So, in The Beginning, when I was just a young padawan on the Internet, I had been let into a glorious secret: Emulation (not of IBM System/360 machines, but of more important things like the Super NES). Some branching from there led me to zophar.net, a popular emulation site, and their message boards, and also left me with a fascination with emulation.

The attributes of some of the older systems like the NES and Super NES made it fairly easy to capture their music-producing software, since those systems used separate co-processors to handle music effects. NES music would be stored in the NSF format, and SNES music was handled with the SPC format (named after the audio chip used, the Sony SPC700). There were (and still are) specialized plugins on many systems to play these formats (they emulated only the music chip, not the rest of the system).

I’ve been involved on the periphery of some of these things for the past couple of years. (For instance I had written a KFileMetaInfo plugin for KDE 3, and had helped Chris Lee with adding playback support to GStreamer.

One problem with the previous GStreamer solution (which I’ll call gst-spc) is that the underlying playback library, libopenspc, is written in x86 assembly, and has some crash bugs associated with it as well. As well the code has long been orphaned. I’m not really any good at writing emulation code and although I could learn, it would take far too much time for me to do anything useful.

Luckily for me the state of the art has advanced and last year I was pointed to a library called game-music-emu. This library included a very good SPC emulator written in C++, which had been merged into some popular SNES emulators already. Unfortunately it didn’t really have a great build system (using it involved simply copying it into your existing program) so my initial proposal to port GStreamer to use game-music-emu by simply including the source files with GStreamer was rejected. The GStreamer devs preferred to have an external library which could be used (or not) and I couldn’t blame them since in general good OSS projects avoid copying or forking external code.

So I contacted the game-music-emu author (Blargg) asking about the possibility of adding support for building a library, and ended up with commit access and an invitation to do it myself. Hmm.

So I did, and awhile ago I had made a release of “libgme” 0.5.5, working with Blargg has he got free time. My subsequent patch to GStreamer was accepted and since gst-plugins-bad-0.10.14 it has been possible to use libgme to playback many emulated music file types (not just SNES, but others as well).

With that solved I left the issue, but I recently came back to it since I figured out that even after upgrading to gst-plugins-bad-0.10.17 the other day, that gstreamer playback was not using libgme, but the older libopenspc.

At first I thought it was simply my fault, as I’d still had gst-spc installed from years and years ago. Removing gst-spc and libopenspc (just to be double-sure) left me with no SPC playback features. Running gst-inspect confirmed I did not have any gme decoder. WTF.

I then again thought it was my fault because I had installed libgme to /usr/local instead of /usr. So I dutifully wrapped up libgme in an ebuild and installed it. And still nothing. WTF.

I dug into the Gentoo ebuild for gst-plugins-bad and it seems that for whatever reason not all possible plugins are installed. It seems the new installation method is supposed to be that each individual plugin is supposed to have its own ebuild (i.e. gst-plugins-gme), like how Gentoo has split out other packages like KDE into individual ebuilds. Fair enough.

I write another ebuild, and finally hit paydirt:



The Qt example music player playing SPC files

Obviously this does require that you are using the GStreamer backend for Phonon to have this work, otherwise you can just try it in some other GStreamer-using application. (I’d show it in JuK but I’d have to add SPC support to Taglib first)

If you’re interested in the ebuilds I used you can use this Portage overlay, (SHA-512 sum c0ff9aa5413b0c0b14f7c52d5b3ee887edc4e7bf47182e58c21e9c340d8ff7e9). The overlay may or may not work for you, and I don’t even know if overlays are still the “hip” way to do things in Gentoo, but It Works For Me. ;)