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I'll give them a test tomorrow. If it works, I think I'll add them to the 1tracker engine as a selectable option (like the Octode XL), so the user could choose whether he needs the classic one, +3 compatibility, or unbalanced volume.

As I was playing with it in the recent years, I came to conclusion that wtbeep is one of the finest engines available at the moment, at least in regards to the sound diversity combined with the ease of use. The two downsides are is that it is not compatible with +3 (not a big deal), and the carrier hiss that is a bit too audible at times.

So I thinking about possibilities to improve the latter issue. A couple ideas:

- Maybe do 3 sound loops, one is single channel, another is two channel, and the last one is the current three channel one. Tracker can adjust the pitch and set appropriate core per row. This will add a bit clarity, although maybe the hiss will get more noticeable, because it will be turning on and off all the time.

- Maybe make unorthogonal channels. Two with selectable waveforms, and one either a simple square tone (good enough for bass), or variable duty cycle tone. Should probably speed up the sound loop a little bit and make hiss less audible.

Another neat feature to have would be an unequal volume balance, maybe switchable on a per row basis, or two loud channels and one a bit quieter - would be good for echoing stuff. Not too sure if it can be done with the current design, though.

Got an idea for the next gen engines that I hope to demonstrate soon in a pretty rad new (-ish) engine I'm giving finishing touches to at the moment.

We've got the sampled drums in many engines already, sometimes even non-interrupting ones. Even with the interrupting ones, why not get it one step further and allow to manipulate the sample sound on the fly, through a set of parameters like we do for our synthesized drums?

I tested three ideas and got pretty cool results in a separate test:

- The least impressive one is just a sample offset. Start each drum for specified sample offset instead of 0. A good old technique that comes from MOD trackers (I used it often in the past to imitate opening/closing filter on the reso bass).

- Volume. It is possible to get 4 levels of volume within a 120-t sample loop (~30 kHz samples). This is achieved by out'ing a value 4 times per each bit, and self-modifying nop/xor a between the outs. Much like the tone channel volume balance in Tritone and some other engines.

- Pitch. It may be tricky to implement it in a way that would not affect the drum duration in an unpredictable way (to compensate the tempo properly). And here comes a fun find. I was thinking of the modern slice-based methods of the pitch adjustment that does not affect the pitch (like YouTube's 0.5x..1.5x etc), and thought it technically could boil down to just not playing some of bits within a byte. And it actually works! At least it gives an illusion of the reduced pitch on some samples, and I assume it'll give at least some sound character changes in other cases.

Was messing around with this engine recently, and has found a really good use for the W in the ES mode indeed. I hooked it up to the phase control. When the W column is empty, the phase is free running, so it sounds just like it was (full backwards compatibility). The values of 1..8 now set a specific phase for the channel at start of a note, and not only it helps to separate sequences of the same notes, which previously were sounding like one continuous note (this was a problem I was intending to solve), but also gives a fine control over the timbre of an interval that is varies pretty well.

The updated version is attached, will be included into the future releases.

Making of Faulty Robots article is finally available in English.

I forgot if we're used it somewhere, but a phasing effect with a couple of 16-bit adders:

add hl,bc
add ix,de
ld a,h
xor ixh
cp 128
sbc a,a

Actually I was experimenting with the Phaser idea applied to a 4-bit DAC (i.e. AY) with a quirk: instead of toggling the sole bit on and off with the overflow of each of the generators, why not XOR a couple of possible 4-bit values. Like, in the regular operation mode both XOR the output with 15, and we're getting the regular Phaser sound. However, if one of generators XORs a lesser value, the phasing effect kinda gets reduced. So we can control the amount of the effect in the channel, which gives it another dimension. The test is attached (press any key).

That's nice, 150 bytes here and there would make an extra K. How long does it take to decompress?

Yes, that was Shrinkler, a few versions in fact. No, haven't tried ZX0, because there is a large test table for all Z80 packers, and ZX0 shows worse results for all test datasets there than apultra.

A small behind the scenes post about this release.

The engine support has been added to 1tracker. Time to push the boundaries a bit further!

Sorry, I don't use Github, so unless some uploaded it there, it isn't there. And I doubt anyone did that.