Here it is!   Making this was quite an adventure. I went a bit overboard and used the MMC5 expansion for 2 extra square channels. It would have been hard to make the more atmospheric parts without them. 

I love Famistudio.  In a Normal DAW I  just get lost in synthesizer settings and can't finish a project.  The simplicity of the NES sound chip helps me focus on just making music.  I still have some issues controlling phase interference as when you play the song twice it never sounds exactly the same. Using envelopes help mitigate interference artifacts but I still get a few random glitches here and there.  I would be curious playing this on a real Famicom.

The title Mental Imperialism is at least in part conceptually inspired by the first novel of Frank Herbert's Dune. Which I re-read recently. Paul Atreides is faced with a cruel destiny and seemingly impossible odds. Yet he triumphs and becomes emperor through the sheer power of his superhuman mind. 

Awesome dude! I guess you are ready for the movie to come out then? 

That's a valid point for phases. I never thought about that. Ill try asking around some of the chiptune gurus to see what they say. 

In the mean time if you have a simple ROM that shows the problem, i can run on my NES let you know, we could see how it reacts.

-Mat

I actually DO have a FDS that I got in a ''Junk'' lot from Yahoo Japan for peanuts. Quite a long time ago. It was never able to read disks but it might do for playing music? Can the extra FDS channel be accessed with a flashcart ? The extra FDS channel kind of scares me though, hahaha. 

Also, I remember from years ago when I was pretty deep into console repair and modding, some folks were selling ''blank'' boards with expansion audio chips. They were intended for making repros. You just had to burn the ROM and install it in the board. I have a Gimmick NES repro that as far as I know was made with these. I meant to modify my NES to be able to play expansion audio but I never got around to it. My days of modding were a bit cut short when I became an ebay powerseller and my focus shifted.   

The one thing that bugs me is why are the waveforms not aligned the same at each playthrough? If the reset points are predictable, does that mean that there is some randomness to the initial state of the waveform when the generator resets ? Or do the channels drift from each others over time ?  Your explanation on what triggers the reset is indeed somewhat lost to me but what I do get is that it can be triggered by the right sequence of events.  Maybe this can be exploited by playing some short ghost notes, will the reset still occur if the volume of the note is 0 ?

Using the pitch enveloppe to further control these issues sound like a good idea. Somehow I had not realized it allowed for such fine adjustments. How is ''one pitch unit'' defined ? 

By the way I replied to your question on youtube in case you did not get a notification or something. 

I actually dont know if a Famicom cartdrige can access the FDS sound chip, very good question. Youll have to do some googling on that. 

For the phase stuff, FamiTracker has a sweep effect that happens to (almost accidentally) triggers a phase reset. I know some people use it as such. For us we could add a "phase reset" track in the effect panel. Like a simple thing that you set to 1 to trigger a phase reset. Feels hacky tho.

http://famitracker.com/wiki/index.php?title=Effects_Hxy_and_Ixy

Oh boy, a pitch unit is very fuzzy. Its the same units that you use in the pitch envelopes. Basically its gonna look something like this (this is in hexadecimal, trackers loooove hexadecimal):

http://famitracker.com/wiki/index.php?title=2A03/MMC5/VRC6_square_frequency_regi...

It basically measures the length of 1 cycle of the waveform.

So higher pitches have tiny values, which low pitches have HUGE values. So a delta of +1 or -1 will be a lot more significant in high-pitches.  FamiStudio does not try to compensate for any of this. You can probably hear it already on instrument with vibrato.

-Mat