This release makes the game audible. Open Nectar now runs Pikmin's original JAudio sound engine instead of a reimplementation, so music, sound effects and cinematic audio all play.
Sound
Earlier builds drove audio through a hand-written mixer. It reproduced parts of the engine, but instruments were detuned, some effects never fired, and several scenes were silent.
Open Nectar 0.2 runs the game's real audio code instead. The sequencer, instrument banks, oscillators and channel manager are the original ones; only the boundary where the GameCube's DSP chip used to sit is replaced by a software renderer.
What this fixes:
- Background music in menus, the save-file screen, the world map and all stages
- Sound effects: whistle, Pikmin, enemies, objects, UI
- Cinematic audio, including the ending sequence
- Instrument tuning and timbre
- Boss-mode music layers, scene transitions and pausing
- Static and dropouts
- The audio path is covered by a self-test (--audio-self-test) that walks the scenes, stages, boss transitions, muting, sound effects and cinematic streams.
Frame rate
A 120 FPS option joins 30 and 60 in the F1 settings menu. All three are safe: the game integrates by elapsed time, so raising the rate does not speed up gameplay.
120 FPS needs a display that can show it. On a 60 Hz panel with VSync the game still presents at 60.
Fixes
- Sample banks failed to load because a 64-bit host pointer was truncated to 32 bits when the audio heap was set up
- Scenes started silent because the current track id was published after the callback that starts playback, so the callback discarded the new track
Known limitations
- Cinematics play their audio, but video is not decoded yet, the H4M decoder is not implemented
- 120 FPS is marked experimental
Credits
The software DSP and bank loader come from pikmin-nextos, adapted here from SDL3 to SDL2. Their licence and attribution are in third_party/nextos-audio/.
Both projects build on the projectPiki decompilation.