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Sigh... I'm still pissed about the whole story.

I remember these ports making rounds a couple of years ago, though I can't remember either who did them. The problem is that none of these work on actual hardware, at least not without modifications to the board (including my 1k2b). An actual unmodded ZX81 will produce a loud static noise which drowns out any music played by the machine.

A dedicated noise channel might also be interesting (with fake volume control through the duty cycle approach, otherwise it will overpower the sample channels), because noise is expensive when PWM sampled.

I'm thinking dedicated tone channels might not even be necessary since they can be "emulated" with PWM samples. Even simple chords should not be too expensive in terms of memory usage. Maybe 3 sample channels can be done instead? Don't know how feasible that would be in terms of overloading. The same applies to additional tone channels, of course. For example, I tried using some longer breakbeat samples in Squat. That almost completely drowned out the tone channels.

Cheers guys! Great compo, lovely tracks from y'all. Hearing good old LSengine put a smile on my face.

I'm a bit surprised that Horseman scored comparatively low. I thought it was a very strong entry.

Regarding the samples, what surprised me is that those acid chirps worked so well, as in, they interfere much less with the tone channels than I was expecting. They took surprisingly little memory as well. This gave me an idea for a new engine, actually. How about just two channels of pitchable PWM samples or'ed together? With a bit of extra magic from the PWM encoder it should be quite flexible. As in - make 0 a special value instead of just an end marker - if followed by another 0, loop to the sample start (to enable tones), if followed by 1, stop sample playback, any other value = extend current half-cycle by n-2 samples. The converter should also invert the data if the total number "on" samples is greater than the total number of "off" samples.

Yay, got one in as well. Alright, let's have a blast!

A little reminder about the approaching deadline of the beeper compo at Multimatograf. Let's show all the lAYmers who's the boss

Great find, as always. I recall reading about this shutdown event before, but didn't know a recording existed in the wild.

I think the best option is to just wire the PC Speaker socket to a line out, and connect that to your hi-fi. Alternatively, most older sound cards have a socket for routing the PC Speaker through it (labelled SPKIN, usually), so you just need to connect that to the PC Speaker socket with a jumper cable.

Even though I'm originally from Germany, I've never heard of that console before, let alone seen one in the wild.
Since it's supported in MAME it could, in theory, be support it in Bintracker.

upd7810 seems very funky. Not sure what they were thinking when they designed that. Could be fun to program it, though.

Ah, good. I'm really too tired to dig into this today.

I wonder what causes that high-pitched whine. This and the slow speed makes me think that the engine isn't running at the 2MHz I was assuming. Are there any interrupts still active? Are there any additional delays when writing to the SN, or is it possible that video is causing some blockage?

Optimizing the data read will only get you so far. Since the overall volume is low, row transitions will always be noticable. You might gain more by writing to all 3 tone channels instead of just one, provided you can make the inner sound loop run fast enough.

You might also consider mapping each Tritone channel to it's own SN channel. That would make things less timing critical.

Spotted another one - you're missing the row length counting, ie.

    dex                         ;2  row length low byte
    beq .play_note              ;3 -- 95 ~ 21053Hz (original is 22876Hz)

    dey                         ; row length hi byte
    beq .play_note

where X should be 0 on init, and Y should be whatever Tritone spits out as row length. I don't have Tritone's data format at hand right now but iirc it should be the first byte of a pattern row.

Wow, didn't know Stephane Picq was still active

My French hasn't gotten any better over the years so I'm afraid listening to that much of it in one go will make my head explode, but somebody should pester these guys to play some modern 1-bit stuff.