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The 1-Bit Forum → Posts by bushy555
If you PM me I'll send you the source. Would be interesting to hear the songs on the VZ/Laser
I am slow! But a PM-email thing has been sent.
thanks & cheers & beers.
...rather rude of me asking, but : if these were done in 1tracker, Beepola or Bintracker , any possible chance of the original saved source? Am always after more sources so that they can be assembled for the VZ/Laser computers.
If not, or if not ever going to release the tracking source, then I also fully understand and appreciate that.
Cheers
Easter Friday. I did a thing in the shed. Please excuse the mess and the visual aspect - it is supposed to be all about the tunes!
I changed about 20 of the music players that work extremely well on the VZ to play out through its cassette port rather than the piezo speaker (cassette port is bits 2&3 , instead of bits 0&5). Phasers, Buzzkick, Betaphase, Squats, WTBEEP
This is a (rough) 9 minute video showing about ten songs of Utz's and Shiru's that work and sound terrific through the cassette port of a VZ300 computer. They sound so much better than the "tinny" sound of a piezo speaker that sits under the main board inside the keyboard.
Anyway, this is the VZ300 computer. Excuse the missing keys and whatnot - I only picked this particular keyboard up two weeks ago and haven't cleaned it up yet.
Much thanks to Shiru and Utz for their programming skills, their trackers & players, their tunes, their knowledge and for getting me into this 1-bit stuff.
Six years ago not a single VZ/Laser computer enthusiast would have ever thought that this was conceivably possible, yet, here we are. I'm really hoping to get a few more Laser/VZ fans enthused into 1-bit music over on our FB page, since they can now simply load in the music players via standard WAV file cassette loading, and then quickly swap over and plug in amplified speakers to listen to the resulting tunes.
This article has just hit hack-a-day --- might go a bit viral for a day or two.
1tracker v0.32 : Love your two new songs included being Freezing Point and Geostorm.
Have got them working reasonably nicely on the VZ200.
9 months later, and a little bit off-topic from the ZX:
I've done a lot of fiddling & tinkering on the VZ200 with trying an anything and everything approach with the various players that I've got working on the VZ. Randomly select a player and try to get something (ala animated graphics) working , just as a trial and error to see & take note of the differences between the engines to work out what is capable of driving a few moving graphics and what is not.
The VZ is somewhat nearly on par with the ZX specs. Many of the players that I've managed to port and get running on the VZ, of course, consume or seem to consume near 100% utilisation.
I've had success with quattropic with bouncing fake equaliser bars in both text mode as well as the VZ's "high" resolution which is 128x64. Of course this has slowed the music down a fraction - enough to notice, but still listenable.
Also I grabbed the ZX10 player and am using it in the background for an unfinished car moving game ; admittedly the sprite-type graphics are very few so far, but what I do have working reads the keyboard fine, moves the graphics incredibly fast and smooth with no noticeable loss in the quality or the speed of the music.
Both of these I have added code to where the players original check-for-keyboard-to-quit routine is. So far seems to work ok.
On the other hand, the likes of Phaser3 is so cycle intensive & specific (and sounding awesome!) that changing or adding anything at all causes sound issues straight away. Took me ages and many attempts to even get it working on the VZ - with my limited knowledge.
Offtopic somewhat, but got 'High Orbit' sounding beautifully on the VZ200 (Z80).
I passed your link to a TRS80 Coco fan (he is a 6809 guru), and he is going to attempt to port it over.
Thanks Shiru.
I've finally thrown up most of my working ports for the VZ from both Utz's, Shiru's and Oleg's incredibly-skilled programming engines, of which, I am always in awe of. There really is only a few lines of code to change to make these work for the VZ computer. Of course, timings are out when you change from "OUT (C), A" to "LD ($6800), A", and I am always selecting one at random to try to improve the sound quality by tying to count cycles and improving the timings. But, at least they do work.
https://github.com/bushy555/VZ200_VZ300___1-bit_tunes
".VZ" is the VZ/Laser emulator snapshot file. These can also be converted into a WAV file, and loaded directly into a real computer.
Phaser 3 engine is mostly working. This is Fase Dos and the other song (unsure of its name), both running on a real VZ300.
Please ignore the video display hashing.
I'm pretty stoked with the results considering that this is way beyond the original design capabilities of this computer.
There is something still not quite 100% right though, as can be heard in Fase Dos towards the end.
https://youtu.be/q8fun4KH-FI
https://youtu.be/ols1dqZVXfg "Fase Dos"
Finally managed to get Dark Fusion working.
Seems to be nearly spot on from after listening to the MP3 of the original.
Apologies for the potato recording.
All,
Have just noticed - version 0.3 no longer works on Windows XP.
v0.29 does, and am still tinkering with it.
Just wanted to give a heads up. Not that anyone else in the world still uses XP other than myself.
Cheers,
Connected my little VZ300 up to the sound system in my ute, and away we go...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PePs5NY1qdo
Ten plus minutes of a compilation of VZ 1-bit ripped music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2haMu2tPs0
For anyone else reading this thread, here is a quick vid I did back in January with a few engines running from real hardware.
Please ignore / excuse the quality of the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHmQyP6IU84
Haven't really looked at 1-bit since then. Still have many many ideas and plans floating in my head of things to do and try.
Engines using the pulse interleaving technique (Savage, Tritone, many others) most likely will not work on piezos. Pulse interleaving relies on inertia of the speaker cone, which is practically absent on piezos. So only engines using OR mixing (Squeeker, Squeeker Plus, PhaseSqueek, Squat) and maybe pin pulse engines will work.
We've managed to get horrible noises coming out of the piezo using Savage and Tritone; but that now makes a lot more sense. We can perhaps put out efforts towards PhaseSqueek. Must admit though, Squat is one of the very few that I have not yet looked at at all.
That said, VZ also has tape out, right? I'd focus on using that for sound instead of the piezo.
Gave it a go with Huby and Octode - dead-set simple to simply change the bits and after plugging in an amplified speaker separated by two 0.1uf ceramic caps, it worked brilliantly; outputting straight to the cassette port.
We're just not too sure that our VZ audience will want to be mucking around wanting to , or needing to plug in stuff. Sure, it could be their loss, but.... since we do have a piezo I think our aim is to attempt to utilise it the best we can. And as well to attempt to (1) go well beyond the level that the computer was designed for and (2) blow the minds of those that have never heard of such beaut audio coming out of the humble little computer. Heh! Or something like that...
Waulok : ...about right isn't?
Happy new year by the way.
Cheers.
Waulok and myself are trying to get Savage player to work correctly on our humble little real Z80 computer.
We have it working and sounding beautifully on one of our emulators, but, the real hardware doesn't want to play ball, and the current sound output it horrible. We are essentially trying to run Savage's ZX Spectrum interrupt vectors on the VZ
Shiru : Just our of curiosity, would Savage still work and play ok, if we could simply remove all interrupt vector code, and have the stack sitting at the normal usual location? What exact changes would be required to remove the IM2 and IM1 code?
Please be patient with me --- I'm trying to learn asm but do have a bit of difficulty in understanding some of the code when deciphering it.
Cheers.
Another 20 minutes later, and Velvet is partially working.
A few hours later after posting the above, at home, reading various threads on here and I find the interesting post of the Trantor engine.
Download it, eight minutes later I have it up and running - and it sounds beautiful !
Thanks heaps Utz.
Have played around with moving bits 3 & 4 to our bits 0 and 7 in WT and also changed your listed hex within all of the sample files - alas, there really wasn't any improvement unfortunately. I'm guessing I'm just missing something. I also played with shifting bits 3&4 in some of the other engines that I haven't managed to get any audio out yet; so far with little success, but I'll keep at it as I'm still currently really enthused in all of this. Whenever I find any spare time I just tinker with various ideas to no end to try to get something working.
I also did actually finally get around to start to properly count cycles for the heck of it, for the replacement LD opcode instead of ZX's OUT; trying to get the code in blocks of 8-states. Has improved sound quality in one or two engines; Still needs a lot more time spent into it, so it might be worthwhile me in doing this to all current players that I have working to reduce noise.
A few very rough grabs of a few engines playing on an Emulator are shown below. Sorry for the useless video and audio capturing, but does give a rough indication of the varying engines that I've managed to get working.
https://youtu.be/_5EdaxGSf4U Tritone. Song: Journey.
https://youtu.be/eH4I1I7XuJo Tritone FX
https://youtu.be/oDN6jTbStY8 PhaserX. Song: Frohen Mohawk
https://youtu.be/aimDaYDt2FU PhaserX. Song: Last Summer, with equaliser demo.
https://youtu.be/PE52gYiFWw4 Pytha.
https://youtu.be/ZyS1Vlr1jX0 Quadtropic with lores and hi-res equaliser.
https://youtu.be/Stm_25S97zk Betaphase
https://youtu.be/uFYL9rsO410 VZ demo game with ZX10 engine
https://youtu.be/EQDAdN9sNFs PhaserSqueek
Phasersqueek is the best sounding engine yet. It is just clean and crisp, and was just a cinch to convert. And I was gobsmacked upon the first running and hearing it.
PhaserX, Quadtropic, ZX and Huby seem to be the engines that can be used for games / demos without effecting performance too much. Trying to run the same code for the text equaliser in Pytha, Phasersqueek, Beta, Octonode etc just either fails from my lack of programming knowledge or the VZ simply doesn't have enough grunt to do whatever as well as the music engine.
I really want to get zbmod working; however, have already had two separate good attempts at it now, and unfortunately both were a failure.
I will attempt to get some more tunes playing on real hardware very shortly in the next week.
Have managed to convert quite a number of other engines over, however, some are extremely noisy because I just can't get the timing right yet.
I finally, after a number of hours and umpteen assesmbles, managed to get Tritone working very nicely with the song "Journey" that is included in the way-depths of the _Development directory in Z88DK. Sounds pretty cool.
Something like WTFX, ...and me not having the asm experience necessary, what would be the best recommendation in this instance?
The changing of all of the ZX's "OUT(C),A" to the VZ's "LD ($6800), A" <or> "LD [reg],$6800 / LD ( [reg] ), A"
...and then thusly fixing the timing ? For this Frame 1 through to Frame 5?
Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.
Doh! I can't even get the bbs tag working for the screenshot.
Screenshot of WTFX asking for suggested code or pointers is here : https://imgur.com/a/RWgdHht
cheers
Dave
...four months later :
The four engines in BinTracker (Betaphase, PhaserX, PhaseSqueek and Pytha engines) took only minutes to change over and all four are now working on the VZ. The ~seven demo songs that came with Bintracker play nicely within both MESS and VZEM emulators. I have not yet had the chance to try on real hardware, however, can not see any reason why they would not work.
Unfortunately I haven't taken any video/youtube of these playing as of yet --- I will video real hardware when I get the chance.
Have made four "Huby musicbox" programs, each with around eight to ten Huby tunes, each tune selected by menu option. My limited programming methods limit the maximum program size to 32k; hence why I have four separate programs. However, having around ~38 music tunes , just off the Huby engine, is pretty cool.
Still wanting to try to convert Stocker and Q-Chan engines.
Engines now working on the VZ / Laser:
Huby
ZX10
POWW
Earthshaker
Earshaker
LSEngine
Ntropic
Pytha
Octonode
Betaphase
PhaseX
PhaseSqueek
Buzzkick : not working yet.
ZX7: Not yet working
Plipplop : not yet working
cheers
Thanks for the comments AtariTufty. This is so much fun - wish I had started dabbling in this years ago with what ever I had at the time. Think I first started with the Ti Calculator WAV player asm listing after stumbing across it years ago. I should have taken the initiative and kept looking!
Utz: thanks for the files and info. Have just replied to your email with a few listings and info on the VZ sound.
Cheers.
Hi all,
I'm a bit of a 36 year fan of the VZ200/VZ300 computers, also known as the Vtech Laser210 and Laser 310 and a few other names around the world. When I was younger I always wanted to know if it were possible and would love to see the day that this little computer could sing anything like the ZX , or heck, anything like the C64 sid chip. For years I always wondered.
Along came Z88dk, and the closest thing was the bit_synth() and bit_fx() that the fella's created. Then in Z88dk v1.9a they released Tri-tone for the ZX in this release, but for the life of me I couldn't work out how to create a VZ library to integrate with it. However, looking at Tri-tone within Z88dk source started my search for its origin as well as other 1 bit players...
Then one day a few years ago I was doing a google, and found Utz's "how to create a 1 bit player" thread on this forum. I spent the next few weeks at work trying and trying to get either or both methods to assemble correctly and to , simply play something. And I just couldn't do it. Couldn't get anything to work. I simply then gave up.
Only about six weeks or two months ago now something twigged inside me, and I got re-motivated again. I grabbed all of Utz and Shiru's source code for umpteen players that I could find. For both the ZX and the Ti Calculators, grabbed Beepola and 1-tracker - and quickly saw that they wrote the asm source code to each players engine along with the tune data. Wowsers, thats pretty awesome stuff right there. And then I started dabbling. First with Huby, then Poww, ZX10, Ntropic etc. Changing all of the ports OUT($FE),A to AND 33/LD ($6800),A , a few small mods for the VZ (a lot of this trial and error), and then assembing with TASM. And bugger me if I wasn't blown away when I finally got Huby to play coming out of the speakers. I was jumping for joy. I was making history --- The first time ever , as far as I am aware of, that a 1-bit tune was playing on a VZ "something" - in this case , the "something" was a ~98% accurate emulator (VZEM) by an Aussie bloke Guy Thomason. I then quickly shoved it on to my real VZ300. And I was *gobsmacked*. Never before such an awesome tune came out of this little device. The original manufactures in downtome Hong Kong in 1983 would not have ever known what their little Z80 @3.5Mhz could achieve something so masterful , so pure and so mesmerising to the ear.
That was perhaps a month ago now, I've since tinkered a lot more and now have 29 songs within 4 Huby "music box" programs, POWW, Ntropic, Earthshaker, LS Engine, ZX10, and the original Octode player all working - at least in the Emulator. A few timing / interrupt issues are stopping all of these engines working on real hardware, and am working on resolving these. Huby, ZX10, Octode, POWW, Ntropic and Earthshaker now all work on real hardware. Octode with its 8 channels is glorious, whilst Earthshaker sounds the most crisp and cleanest on the VZ's little piezo internal speaker.
What I am after now is a source (website or ftp) for asm sources for more songs written by proper 1-bit music artists. I am certainly not a composer, and couldn't compose a song if I had to. Does anyone know of a website where a composer has numerous songs in some of these formats?
I've had a go at searching for .bbsongs for beepola and .1tm's for 1-tracker, but there really isn't all that much floating around. I have already gone through all of ~50(?) Beepola's examples and have extracted those that sounded ok in Huby.
I guess I really need to attempt to get some of these other engines working - (....though my Z80 asm is somewhat limited when it comes to trying to read & decypher others uncommented highly-optimised listings.)
Anyway, just wanted to sing a huge shoutout to Utz and Shiru and all others that have provided these asm listings. It has given me a great new perspective on these little computers - and has given me a lot of joy in getting these players up and running over the past month. Currently trying to get Pytha and Anteater up and running....
These youtubes were my first early attempts after I had just gotten then running on real hardware.
I should re-do them, and I now have cleaned these all up and are much better in appearance at least.
I also have a hacked piezo speaker output into my od monitor, hence why the sound is so much louder.
Octode
https://youtu.be/-nJnMcd-UVY
ZX10
https://youtu.be/I8Tyv0i0U8I
Huby
https://youtu.be/rYspaBVw0tk
POWW & Ntropic
https://youtu.be/59Cebnxb7Mc
/cheers,
Bushy.
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