Finally, a website with compo rules and explaination on how to send an entry, with the english version: https://chaosconstructions.ru/compos
277 2018-08-02 09:56:44
Re: upcoming beeper compos (135 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.
278 2018-08-02 06:28:11
Re: upcoming beeper compos (135 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).
279 2018-07-08 10:56:48
Re: Compo: DiHalt 2018 (6 replies, posted in Sinclair)
7 entries this year. No full results just yet, but congrats, AtariTufty!
280 2018-06-30 15:52:30
Re: Compo: DiHalt 2018 (6 replies, posted in Sinclair)
Just a reminder, one week left before compo.
281 2018-06-26 23:32:56
Re: Tesla Coil Music (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.
282 2018-06-23 12:53:52
Re: PCSPE VSTi - create oldschool PC Speaker music with a DAW (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.
283 2018-06-10 07:28:50
Re: PCSPE VSTi - create oldschool PC Speaker music with a DAW (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.
284 2018-06-09 03:40:27
Re: PCSPE VSTi - create oldschool PC Speaker music with a DAW (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.
285 2018-06-04 05:36:55
Re: Welcome to the 1-Bit Forum (aka The Introduction Thread) (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.
286 2018-05-26 13:27:09
Re: Philips Videopac/Magnavox Odyssey2... is it possible? (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.
287 2018-05-25 18:52:50
Re: Philips Videopac/Magnavox Odyssey2... is it possible? (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.
290 2018-05-02 23:44:32
Re: Compo: Multimatograf 2018 (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.
291 2018-05-01 18:18:29
Re: [Apple II] Electric Duet (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.
292 2018-05-01 17:20:25
Re: PCSPE VSTi - create oldschool PC Speaker music with a DAW (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.
293 2018-05-01 15:29:07
Re: [Apple II] Electric Duet (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.
294 2018-04-30 18:54:22
Re: Electronic toys, wristwatches, keychains, greeting cards, and so on. (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.
295 2018-04-30 16:13:33
Topic: Electronic toys, wristwatches, keychains, greeting cards, and so on. (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).
296 2018-04-30 13:48:23
Re: New engine: Ear Shaver (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.
297 2018-04-29 17:01:00
Topic: New engine: Ear Shaver (5 replies, posted in Sinclair)
A new simple engine is made and added to 1tracker. Nothing too special, but it mixes a few features of various engines: the Earth Shaker engine sounding one (but implemented in a different way), two-channel Tritone-like engine, and sampled drums. This provides a major variety in the loudness, so it may get more dynamics to the 1-bit music.
The engine has two separate tone generation loops, either of those can be invoked for every row, both sharing the same register set to store accumulators and adders, as well as same timings (120t for sound loop, ~30 Khz sample rate). Technically even more different types of engines can be combined like that.
298 2018-04-29 16:55:09
Re: 1tracker v0.47 (166 replies, posted in Sinclair)
A new engine added without changing the version, Ear Shaver.
299 2018-04-26 18:14:00
Re: Sharp SM-510 MCU (handheld LCD game) emulator/ tracker? (14 replies, posted in Other Platforms)
if you want to do an authentic sound of a LCD game, you should also consider memory constrains. The early games didn't have much of jingles and complex sound effects just because the mask ROM size is so limited on SM-510 or TMS1x00. It is just 1024 to 4096 bytes for everything, and it seems the code is quite sparse on those 4-bit MCUs - I mean, it needs more operations to do things because of limitations of the architecture.
Later LCD games, however, had quite a lot of music pieces, sometimes polyphonic, with white noise, or even actual (not LPC encoded) voice samples - for example, some of Brick Game versions. Those might be using some kind of 6502 core, but it is not known for sure.
So I guess you need to pick a period of LCD gaming, and if you want to stick to early ones, keep everything at minimum, if you going for later ones, add more stuff.
300 2018-04-26 17:23:46
Re: Sharp SM-510 MCU (handheld LCD game) emulator/ tracker? (14 replies, posted in Other Platforms)
I would keep the overall pitch a little bit higher, it will sound better. That's due the way 8253 works, it does not restart count right away once a new divider is loaded, so if your pitch gets very low, like in a kick drum slide, to a few dozen hz, then you need a high pitched sound, it won't start until one period of the low pitched sound gets completed. So if the pitch was at, say, 24 Hz, it may take up to 1/24 second before higher pitch will take effect, but that maybe a time to play another pitch (arpeggiated) already, and it will sound distorted and kind of like having weird gaps or drop outs.
If you always keep pitch weil above the 'frame rate', it will sound good. I.e. if you use 60 hz update rate, try to keep your pitch not lower than 60 Hz, better to keep it higher than 60 Hz most of the time.
Arpeggios is not a problem for piezo speaker itself. Frequency response is, it cuts most of the low and mid-low end (like up to 700 Hz), and has various resonances in the higher end. Take a look:
