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A ton of distractions happened since, but English translation of the making of the demo is finally here: https://habr.com/ru/post/486010/

Now not 1-bit, but ZX Spectrum related - I made a PT3 player (with AY emulation) that plays files loaded into the internal memory. Cool thing about ESP8266 is that you can load these files over Wi-Fi. Forum thread.

Sounds legit, would be at home in a pre-1985 ZX game.

You don't really need to hand tune pitch values, just use any script engine to calculate them out. JS, Python, etc.

Then, if you go with composing by typing in the pitch values, you don't have to have a spreadsheet. Just make aliases, like C_2=100 (or C_2 equ 100 in some assemblers). Now you can just use note names in your db's.

Then, to save time, you can just generate both pitch values and aliases with the same script, and save a ton of time. You can do this with https://js.do/, for example. Just go there, copy/paste code below, click Run.

<script>

    //standart note table for a high octave

    NoteFreqTable=new Array( 2093.0,2217.4,2349.2,2489.0,2637.0,2793.8,2960.0,3136.0,3322.4,3520.0,3729.2,3951.0 );

    NoteNameTable=new Array("C_","Cs","D_","Ds","E_","F_","Fs","G_","Gs","A_","As","B_");
    
    //generate note to period table

    cpuClock=3500000.0;
    cpuToneLoop=200.0;    //cycles per engine loop
    div=32.0;

    for(octave=0;octave<8;++octave)
    {
        for(note=0;note<12;++note)
        {
            period=Math.floor((cpuClock/(cpuToneLoop/2.0))/(NoteFreqTable[note]/div));

            document.write(NoteNameTable[note]+octave+" equ "+period+"<br>");
        }

        div=div/2;
    }

</script>

The super fine volume/duty effect is certainly real and can be used, that's what I was referring to as having potential (will do something in this regard a bit later).

As for harmonics, yes, I suspect most of it comes from the downsampling filter in emulators, seems to be some unwanted oscillation at high frequencies. Still not clear if there is more to it.

I suspect I'm actually rehashing some old idea, just been experimenting with the phase shift to control volumes yet again. This snippet produces interesting harmonics as the volume rises very smoothly:

    ld hl,0
    ld bc,1200    ;frequency
    ld ix,0
    ld a,0
    
loop1
    ld d,0
loop

    add hl,bc
    jp nc,$+5
    xor 16
    add ix,bc
    jp nc,$+4
    xor a
    
    out (#fe),a
    
    inc d
    jp nz,loop
    
    inc hl   ;slowly increase the volume
    
    jp loop

Volume control here is made of two 16-bit adders that get the same 16-bit value added (3 register pairs per oscillator). The first one inverts the phase, the second one resets it. Volume controlled by the distance between initial values of the adders.

Yes, something of this kind is certainly in my plains, with use of all the 1-bit VSTs and some of the old engines, too.

Oh my, it's been two years now. Two years of 'I'm too tired today, will get back to a song tomorrow'.

At least a new related thing, sampled all three known engines as a SF2 pack. May come handy in prototyping a song with a modern tool, or to bring up these pretty unique sounds into a modern mix.

This engine continues to fascinate me a lot, and although I haven't released anything made with it yet, I had an idea to sample its sounds into a SoundFont (sf2), to be able to use it in a modern DAW without going full on with writing a custom VST (it would need built-in Z80 emulation, doable, but would take much longer - saved it for later).

May come handy to someone - download here. It is a clean version, no carrier hiss there.

I deal with this kind of feedback since 2007 or so, so yeah. Still difficult to stay cool at times.

A while back, way before I took the VST route, I had a desire to support LMMS, which was the best free FL-style DAW out there. I come to their IRC channel and started to ask questions, like, how to make native plugins, are there people who would want it. They said - nah, do VST instead. So I did eventually, and I guess it has been a good advice, after all.

I'm doing a really niche stuff that is barely getting any feedback, and it is a truly demotivating thing. Moving to a niche platform with much lesser user base, especially of the target audience (music producers), that is also happens to have no money to offer (zero job offers for desktop *nix in two decades for me), is a sure way to kill any and all remaining desire to do anything at all. x64 support is just a necessary evil to keep it up now, and it is relatively easy to do.

A true story: in 2002 or so I had to break any interaction with a friend, because he moved to Linux completely (he's a web designer, so GIMP and a text editor was all he needed) and developed a habit of calling me even so often and spend long hours simply repeatedly telling me that I should drop Windows ASAP, and start to program for Linux, because Linux is the new greatest thing in universe and Windows is shit and going to die out soon anyway. This kind of advertising worked very well in alienating me from this stuff up to this day.