Yeah, so that was a waste of time.  Trying to use MP3 audio, I mean.  It’s just not suitable as game music if you want to give people the ability to use their own files.  So I went back to libmikmod, which is fine, especially once I realised you have to allocate a couple of channels manually if you want sound effects to play..

Still, the redesign of the piece code to use the GL-like API certainly was time well spent.  Piece manipulation is much smoother now, and I can go back to shuffling tiles around instead of the fade out/in I had to settle for with the software blitting.  I think I’ll make a release soon.

I had expected to get the first update to Puzl out by now, but I got a bit more ambitious with the music options.  See, everybody wants to use their own music, but most people don’t have mods.  They do, however, have lots of mp3s.  So why not play mp3s?

Well, honestly, the DS isn’t particularly suited to streaming/decoding mp3s while doing anything else, like running a game loop.  I’m using Noda’s excellent AS_Lib (essentially a wrapper for Real’s Helix decoder) and it’s playing back, but I can only handle low bitrates and mono.  This isn’t really a problem considering the poor audio playback from the DS without headphones, but I’d be happier if people could just drop the mp3s they want into the music directory without having to reencode.

So I need to speed up Puzl itself.

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