276 Reply by Shiru

(35 replies, posted in Other Platforms)

Another fun fact gained by the means of digital archeology. I was messing up with the firmwares that featured the sampled speech stuff, attempting to make a sample decoder. They use different formats, I did only one (4-bit samples at 5000 Hz), other ones is well distorted, but recognizeable. I learned that there was the first version to feature voice, it had male voice that only spelled a few numbers and short messages, then there was the second one (Selena), it had best quality female voice. Latter has been ripped, downgraded, and reused all across other firmwares. Derivative versions has varying sample set, some say tens and hundreds, and extra messages, some not.

The fun fact is that one of the firmwares, the only one (of those I checked so far, at least) that features good quality female voice, also has an angry male voice clip in the middle of the data: FUCK OFF! (in Russian)

That made me remember that an urban legend circulated at the time, that if you enter some secret code, you can blacklist a number with such a message played to the caller. Turns out it wasn't really a legend.

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277 Reply by Shiru

(35 replies, posted in Other Platforms)

Got yet another unit, nothing to show really, but it is an old large Z80 board build with one of the oldest firmwares - Arctur 36. Tried to find this one on the webs, and alas, all dumps is now gone. So I dumped it (it is very different from all others), the ROM was unstable, so I had to stare to the hex compare quite a bit. This way I figured that I may seek for hidden messages in firmwares. And there is indeed some! Here is the list for your digital Indiana Jones pleasure.

Fortuna
Fortuna. (C) Copyright 1995.....Digital voice from version "Selena", special thanx !....Illegal copying is strictly prohibited !!!....Hacker - Alex Taran 2:461/256.11 @FidoNet....Phone number (0572) 62-32-79 (24h)

Arctur 36
(p) S.Batalov 095-939.75.05: Improvements, settling to 2764, voice adjusted.

Ravel19f
Corrected by FALCON inc. 7-095-404-6807

Rus7
KMON-U-Overlay read error

Rus13p
Thanx 2 Selena8!

Rus19e
(c) 1995 by RAVEL

Rus20c
(c) 1995 by PASHA. Tel:(095)-251-17-80

Rus20e
(c) 1991-1995 by PASHA, SERGEY. Tel:(095)-251-17-80

Rus20f
(c) 1991-1996 by PASHA, SERGEY. Tel: (095) 268-22-81, 268-28-74

Rus22c
(c) 1991-1996 by PASHA, SERGEY. Tel: (095) 268-09-33

Rus23c (transliterated from Russian)
(c) 1991-97 Pavel Sukhodolsky, Sergey Kosov Tel:(095)2680933  Moscow

Julia25pr
JULIA-25  (C) Copyright Alex Serov (Nj/VIMS), 1993-96.....  FidoNet: 2:461/256.111 (Aka 2:461/144.11)....Digital voice from version "Selena", special thanx !....Special thanx to Alex Taran, 2:461/256.11 @FidoNet

Julia27dp
JULIA-27 d  (C) Copyright Alex Serov (Nj/VIMS), 1993-97.....FidoNet: 2:461/60.1....Digital voice from version "Selena", special thanx !....Special thanx to Alex Taran, 2:461/60 @FidoNet

Julia27f
JULIA-27 F  (C) Copyright Alex Serov (Nj/VIMS), 1993-98.....FidoNet: 2:461/60.1, E-Mail: heiki@iName.com....Digital voice from version "Selena", special thanx !....Special thanx to Alex Taran, FidoNet: 2:461/60, E-Mail: alex@dnp.ukrpack.net....Very big thanx to PS Design, Kharkov

Julia27lp
JULIA-27 L  (C) Copyright Alex Serov (Nj/VIMS), 1993-99. <Nin_Alex@email.com>....For all questions about distributing, future versions, hardware..please refer to Boris (PS Design, Kharkov). E-Mail: <maxlab@kharkov.com>

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278 Reply by Shiru

(35 replies, posted in Other Platforms)

At this moment I'm on the 'make it work' part, before 'make it pretty'. I need to figure out lots of details to create faithful emulation that is useful for new developments. VCL just helps me to speed this process up, as I know VCL very well, while I don't know anything about CLX (yet). Sure, eventually I'll put some time to make it more accessible and useful.

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279 Reply by Shiru

(35 replies, posted in Other Platforms)

So, I finally made my emulator work, more or less. I used the 8253 core recommended by utz for this time being. Sorry, no docs whatsoever so far. A ton of firmwares included, so please be my guest and feel yourself a true hacker exploring them!

I can give you a crash course, though. Load 'rus23c_z80.rom' firmware. All firmwares of this branch use a system where you press * twice to enter F-unction mode, then you press a number to select a function. Press ** 5 to enter Alarm Clock setup. In most modes singular * presses switches between available parameters. Press it until you see 'PLAY 00'. Enter a number between 00 and 24. Hold down * to hear selected tune (it plays while you hold the button). Try song 21 for extra fun.

If you have issues with sound stability, check the cfg file, you can change buffer size there.

Download: http://shiru.untergrund.net/files/aonz80emu.zip

http://shiru.untergrund.net/temp1/aonz80emu_screenshot.png

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280 Reply by Shiru

(136 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Finally, a website with compo rules and explaination on how to send an entry, with the english version: https://chaosconstructions.ru/compos

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281 Reply by Shiru

(136 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Interesting. Never seen this one, and there is silence all around russian web (at least to me) regarding this year. Moreover, this website only lists planned compos, but there is no details, no rules, not even contacts to send entries. My guess this is a website for visitors only.

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282 Reply by Shiru

(136 replies, posted in Sinclair)

I still don't know if the party going to be held this year, and where is their website at all (they have plenty, can't find 2018 one).

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283 Reply by Shiru

(6 replies, posted in Sinclair)

7 entries this year. No full results just yet, but congrats, AtariTufty!

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284 Reply by Shiru

(6 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Just a reminder, one week left before compo.

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285 Reply by Shiru

(4 replies, posted in General Discussion)

Tesla Coil Music was actually featured in a Disney's movie 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' from 2010. The main character was a nerd who experimented with the coils, used them to play music to impress a girl, then used them in order to defeat the main villain (as far as I remember). So the thing kind of had a wide public exposure.

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286 Reply by Shiru

(34 replies, posted in Other Platforms)

In case anyone interested, I also released a drum synth counterpart to ChipWave - ChipDrum. It is capable for some1-bit'ish sounds too.

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287 Reply by Shiru

(34 replies, posted in Other Platforms)

The GUI is Windows only both in PCSPE and ChipWave, pure WinAPI, no third-party libraries there. You can't do anything regarding that for PCSPE, as it really needs the GUI to be functional. For ChipWave you can just delete the GUI code, and it will work just fine with the default interface - it actually started as a GUI-less plugin, was fully developed, then GUI has been added to the top.

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288 Reply by Shiru

(34 replies, posted in Other Platforms)

Updated a little bit, fixed the annoying GUI flickering during plugin load.

Also a shameless plug, just released ChipWave, a synth plugin that has many characteristics of old sound chips such as AY, SID, POKEY, as well as some features that come from 1-bit synthesis. You may find it interesting.

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289 Reply by Shiru

(49 replies, posted in General Discussion)

The musical is a very cool work, I should say. Very well done overall, and the 1-bit part fits there so well.

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290 Reply by Shiru

(5 replies, posted in General Discussion)

I don't really have time to play the auction games, and the buy now prices is not that dirt cheap - it is a price of an used PS4/XBO here, and I don't even know how much the delivery would be, because almost no one sends to Russia. Likely as much, judging by past experiences. And the local prices is downright crazy, $500-1000. I can't afford any of it.

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291 Reply by Shiru

(5 replies, posted in General Discussion)

I'm sure it is possible to squeeze out some beeps out of it.

Actually, Odyssey 2/Videopac is my personal childhood dream. It was like the first 'home computer' (complete with keyboard) I ever seen in a German catalog, and I never seen one in real life, so I was puzzling what can it do and what games it could play, looking to the pictures in the catalog. Still thinking to get one and try to program something for it, a crude tracker/music editor perhaps. But it is quite expensive to get one here, so it always gets postponed. Maybe someday.

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292 Reply by Shiru

(166 replies, posted in Sinclair)

No, not yet.

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293 Reply by Shiru

(5 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Here it is

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294 Reply by Shiru

(5 replies, posted in Sinclair)

So, we're all failed to support this one. Only one beeper song from AER, 14 entries total, mostly AY music.

I was hoping to do a beeper track with the new engine (Ear Shaver), but other things interfered, so only finished the engine itself when the compo was already running.

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295 Reply by Shiru

(4 replies, posted in Other Platforms)

Yes, I remember that attempt with ED, but as far as I know it always had no sound in the editor and no playable output format, it basically used 1tracker as a text editor with a script to compile external data to be used with actual ED engine on Apple 2. I think it would be nice to have a proper support of (some subversion of) this engine.

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296 Reply by Shiru

(34 replies, posted in Other Platforms)

Nice one!

Can you show a screenshot of how it looks in your DAW? I'm interested to see if my readme explains the intended workflow clear enough, and how you arranged the things.

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297 Reply by Shiru

(4 replies, posted in Other Platforms)

Very interesting find and read, thanks a lot! I always thought that ZX beeper music had some missing roots, maybe some computer science magazine or something, where authors of early engines got inspiration and techniques to develop further. Appie seemed a good candidate to be a platform where techniques could have been created, as it predates ZX well and has the same sound capabilities.

The MusiComp is very interesting too. 1980, and it has various duty cycle and something similar to duty modulation. Resembles early non-square wave single channel engines for ZX, such as the first Follin's one.


Maybe I should try to get some Electric Duet support in 1tracker? Just to have that sound color of the past in the sound palette. There is no Apple II sound rip format unfortunately, but there is NES and Atari 8-bit formats support, maybe it can fit there. I would have to make an AngelScript 6502 assembler for better convinience, though.

Another way is maybe try to recreate the engine as close as possible on Z80? Plenty of ZX Spectrum engines got ported to Atari 8-bit, and sounded much the same, so reverse process should be also possible.

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298 Reply by Shiru

(3 replies, posted in Other Platforms)

One interesting thing to consider about these devices is that, like I mentioned, most of them using a 32768 Hz crystal. That's so called 'clock crystal', normally found in digital clocks, it has this specific frequency exactly because it is so easy to get 1 Hz clock out of it by dividing it by 32768 (just 15 D-triggers in sequence).

This, however, means, clock speed of an MCU is normally just 32768 Hz, i.e. it executes 32768 1-t opcodes in a second. We get used to have a 10-30 KHz sample loop in our ZX engines, but you simply can't have a loop that fast on an 4-bit MCU like that. Considering it is 4-bit, there is going to be a plenty opcodes even with simplest 8-bit counter based sound generation loop. Even if you have to generate just a 440 Hz tone, you can only have 32768/440=74 opcodes to do this! So a way to overcome this limitation has to be found, and I think that's what makes these specific non-pure square tones in old electronic games.

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299 Topic by Shiru

(3 replies, posted in Other Platforms)

Recent castpixel's post made me think that we kind of missed a whole big underground of 1-bit sounds and music. One that we can't really exploit due to the nature of the things (one time programmable, made to cost the least possible amount), but it is still interesting in a historical perspective.

In my own experience, in my childhood I was very impressed by a keychain with like 8 buttons, making various sounds effects and melodies through a small speaker. There were plenty of those, some of them responded to a whistle. Here is a video of one of them, very similar to one I recall. As I realize this might be one of the earliest examples of 1-bit synthesized sounds I ever heard.

Then there were wristwatches with many melodies. Many of Casio ones, also a very popular brand Montana. Here is a video.

Later there were many musical greeting cards, paper ones that start to play a song when you open it. Today they all fancy and play digitized audio, but early ones had just a piezo with a monophonic melody, very similar to the wristwatch. Turns out to be somehow difficult to find a video of those now.

I also recall a Russian IC to make door bells, I think yet another clone of something older and similar from the West, first appeared in early 90s. It also played a monophonic melody. In fact those chips are still made, in dozens of versions with different songs! Have no slightest idea who would need them now. Here is a video.

I think I also have heard something non monophonic and non square wave among these things, but can't remember it now, besides those Brick Game toys.

I don't know what exactly is inside those devices, but I suppose it is some 4-bit MCU, similar to the SM-510 or TMS1x00. Most of these devices use a 32768 Hz crystal, so it must be something more fancy than just a set of counters and a ROM (a hard logic implementation of a song player).

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300 Reply by Shiru

(5 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Yes, no effect for W (duty) for ES. Was thinking what can I do for it, but not found an interesting application so far. Maybe will come up with something, so it will be Shaver 2. Would certainly add some noise mode there, maybe a Phaser and QChan like modes too.

Was thinking on those variable-channel engines too. Yes, it is just to difficult to fit into a generalized tracker design. One crude way would be just ignore extra channels in some modes, and add a large general purpose effect column on the side, so each engine will pick only values it needs to from there.

Like,

C-1 123 C-2 123 --- ... ---... ABCDEFG

Four chanenls first, some may be not used in some modes, and values of the ABCDEFG block get interpreted depending on currently active engine. Internally they may be compiled into different structures, or maybe just change a small array of parameter bytes, and each engine will interpret some of the bytes in its own way.

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