ROM Hack How do you change the number of sounds a sound effect can play?

[biolizardshadow]

One very annoying thing in my rom hack is that I'm limited to just one sound playing at a time for a single sound effect and this applies to all sound channels. When I try to get multiple sounds to play at once the game will ignore the track that has the lowest priority and just play one sound. Where would I find out how to up the number of playable sounds that a single sound effect can play?

When the Capcom logo displays the sound effect that plays can play multiple sounds, but as soon as the title screen shows up then the game limits me to just one sound playing from a single sound effect. I looked at the voicetable but that did not help me much. Is there anywhere I should look in particular?

 

[FAST6191]

Two main approaches

1) You edit the sound effects themselves if they are samples and overlap in your chosen audio editor before injecting them back in. Might not be as fun as having a gunshot and tyre screech at the same time but if you kick the combined thing to an unused slot then you can have that where necessary.

2) You find a way to have it kick more things to more channels, though this might mean losing some that the music used (the GBA being fairly limited after all).
I don't know offhand what the sappy sound format might have here for asking for channels and whether you can boost that one up, or indeed whether the game sound API as it were specifies things at playback that you might have to tweak instead.

 

[biolizardshadow]

Never mind I found where that data is stored! It's located above the songtable. The bytes I changed in my rom hack and another GBA game are 00 02 01 00. The third byte determines how many sounds the sound effect can play, so in my case I changed the byte from 01 to 02 so my sound effect can play 2 sounds instead of just one.

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What would happen before is that the game would play the sound effect with multiple sounds, but would mute whatever sound had the lowest priority. What really made this annoying is that this would effect channels 1 through 4 as well as the direct sound channels. In my new sound effect Square 1 and Square 2 both made sounds, however only Square 1 would play a sound and Square 2 would be muted.

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My only question now is why game devs limited themselves like this? Was it because of game performance or something else I'm not aware of?