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A comment from Oleg Origin:

More about the aforementioned games at http://olegorigin.org/zxgames.html.

Oleg Origin also said he's considering a proper release of his engines. Also, he was kind enough to share his disassemblies of the Dark Fusion and Trantor engines. I'm attaching them here with his permission (shitty google translated comments added by yours truly).

Indeed, the border fx are a by-product of the sound generator. It's like this in almost all engines (because the port that sets the beeper state also sets the border colour), so usually there is some small chunk of code to explicitly mask the border fx. I personally like border fx (and will sometimes even customize them a bit, like in beepertoy), but it's considered bad style in the demoscene. In case of Squeeker border effects would be especially tedious to mask, so as the engine was written to be compact, there is no masking.

Hehe yes, Squeeker is quite a beast. I'm planning to do an enhanced version with drums and stuff soon.

Anyway, up next: Chaos Constructions!

Results:

1   8.06   Brink - Just the Tip
2   6.38   AER - SecondMoon
3   6.23   Misha Pertsovsky - Waltz of Ice
4   6.03   Tufty ^ 1-bit forum - Mechanoid
5   5.77   utz ^ irrlicht project - fnk dz
6   5.57   Kakos_nonos - Все идет по плану (ГО кавер)
7   4.84   Abrimaal - Teddybear's Funeral
8   4.67   Lis O'Kryl ^ Therac-25 - Brexit
9   4.29   Garvalf - Horned gods

A bit disappointed with the outcome, but well, there were some very nice works in the compo.

Thanks for the reminder, Vinnny! I still haven't prepared anything, but I hope I'll find some time this week.

Hehe, thanks mate

Well, I have one more crazy idea that I need to put into practise, but after that I should really take a break from this stuff. Going totally nuts on it.

Why of course, you should always use the mic socket

Yes, overall volume is quite low unfortunately. One could probably get a little more volume by properly maximizing all samples, but overall there's not much that can be done about it, I'm afraid. Still experimenting though

Ace! Very intricate composition, I like how the various melody bits meet and diverge again at times.

Just spend several hours writing an engine to investigate my theory about volume ramping. Findings:
- Volume ramping does happen, but it can't be the only culprit.
- Volume ramping seems nearly impossible to control in a meaningful way. The effects are pretty random, certainly not the nice AY buzzer effect I was hoping for. Also, it glitches all over the place which is something I didn't expect. Perhaps I have some bugs in my engine, but I actually calculated the timings several times now and can't find any errors. So, I'm giving up on this for the time being.

Thx guys Barely any post-production, just a tad of added bass (+3 db). For me, fuse adds quite a bit of distortion when 7 or 8 channels are active. There is some distortion on hw, but it's less intrusive and more irregular. Fuse makes the bass sound like a YM buzzer in saw mode, on hw it's more of a muddy, fuzzy kind of sound. Oddly enough with fluidcore it's the other way around - fuse sounds rather clean, whereas hw has random clicks and pops and a nasty buzz when going into higher volume levels. In any case it's surprising, since normally fuse's beeper emulation is quite excellent. Guess I should eventually talk to fred about this, but I first want to investigate a bit more myself.

Also, the more important question for me is what causes these distortions in the first place. At the moment, I have two theories.
1) Full speaker expansion is reached before the sound loop is completed, hence the sound is clipping. However, if that was the case, pulse-interleaving engines should also have that problem, but generally they don't exhibit these symptoms.
2) Speaker cone response is non-linear, ie the cone starts to expand slowly and then gradually moves faster. I think this is more likely, so I'll be looking into this.

Edit: I think I've figured it out. Third, much more logical hypothesis:

3) The problem is that I'm only looking at speaker cone expansion, but not at contraction. Now, when a string of several high volume samples is played, the speaker cone has no time contract inbetween, hence the volume starts to ramp up. For pulse-interleaving engines this is rarely a problem because there, on and off states are alternating most of the time, preventing volume ramping. But fluidcore, wtfx, and Octode 2k16 only toggle the state once or twice within a sound loop frame, so I need to add another mechanism to prevent volume ramping.

This also gives me another idea - perhaps the volume ramping phenomenon can actually used on purpose to simulate the AY buzzer effect. Hmmm... exiting days for beeper.

Awesome, thanks! Glad things went ok.

As far as I can tell, the header image should be in /img, and then some changes in style_cs.css are required:
- in section #brd-head, add "background-image:url(img/header.gif);"
- in sections #brd-title and #brd-desc, add "display: none;" to disable the text (I should probably add the description text to the header image, but let's see if this works at all first)