Requirements
Support Trouble
At the time of writing this manual the requirements to be able to run Pulsar are a little bit controversial.
The problem with Pulsar is that it was originally designed to work with a SXROM configuration in order to be able to use 32KB SRAM/NVRAM. However, currently Nestopia is the only NES emulator that supports this configuration. Further to that, and even more troubling, is that even PowerPak development cartridge doesn't properly support 32KB NVRAM.
However, I do have a PowerPak mapper update given to me by Brian Parker (PowerPak creator) that fixes the problem. As of yet though this mapper update isn't part of the 'official' PowerPak mappers but Brian assures me that it will be sometime soon.
Until that happens Brian has given me permission to distribute the mapper update with Pulsar so you'll find it in the release ZIP file in the 'PowerPak' folder. I'd recommend backing up the old version of the mapper file.
What You'll Need
- A NES emulator or an actual NES - either will do though as I said, until there is PowerPak support for SXROM+32KBNVRAM, you'll only be able to run Pulsar32 using Nestopia
- A control pad, if you're using NES hardware
- A knowledge of existing trackers, especially LSDJ, will help enormously
- An understanding of hexadecimal numbers
- An understanding of the audio capabilities and limitations of the NES
What You'll Get
Check the 'readme.txt' file included in the release for a list of files.
Useful Links
Nestopia NES Emulator
Nestopia is available for Windows and OSX.
PowerPak NES Dev Cart
PowerPak carts are available from Retro USB
NESDEV Wiki - Audio Overview
A simplified version of blargg's authoratative NES APU (Audio Processing Unit) documentation can be found here