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No, I kinda forgot about that one. I do have a real hardware now (although it is Evo, not the original ZX), so maybe I'll give it another go - to make sure how it really sounds without the resampling/aliasing in emulators.

I don't have an authentic Speccy, it does not make much sense to make recordings of the Speccy versions on my end - it would be a basic recording from an emulator. I do have a ZX Evo, but it is not too far from an emulator.

As for making the ZX engine available. Well, it is a kinda tricky thing. The music authoring system is based on 1tracker, and I released the corresponding plug-in and 6502 code. However, it sounds not exactly the same as the actual PET player, or the player from ZX Faulty Robots album. To make ZX port of the album, I did a converter that takes the data in the original 6502 format (a pattern based module), plays it virtually (with a C version of the player), and records down the resulting pitch/waveform stream, putting all the pattern parsing calculations offline. I guess I just need to turn this converter into another 1tracker plugin, so the resulting sound would be most authentic, and the music data would not require any processing before putting it into a ZX program. In short, it isn't directly available yet, but I'll think on how to make it properly.

Yes, it has a custom engine. Nothing fancy there, it basically replicates the 6522 capabilities - the only channel that plays a looped bit pattern, just to make the music match the PET counterpart closely. The ZX port of the game is bundled with a music demo Faulty Robots, a port of the PET one, with all 8 tracks. It just happens to be a commercial game, so I thought it pointless to announce the bundled music demo separately, when the PET original one is freely available.

Thanks, I'll consider to use it in the future projects.

Well, Freezing Point data is certainly not 94K large. You're packing the source text file for some reason.

The binary data is 16714 bytes large, 2768 bytes after packing with the apultra. You can try ZX5 on this data (attached).

I used apultra to pack everything, including players. Players and music data were packed separately, so players get reused. I also tested some even better packers, but they would take like half a minute to decompress in the worst case, which is unacceptable.

Even with the best packing, I needed a large buffer for the largest unpacked song, it was nearly 19K. At this point it couldn't fit at all.

I had to:

- Place my code as low as #5b00, disabling the BASIC interrupt handler completely
- Overwrite the screen drawing code with the song buffer
- Decrease the two largest songs

In order to decrease the largest songs size, which happened to be Freezing Point and Geostorm, I first made a function that optimizes out the empty rows by reducing the speed of a row before (recursively, as long as row speeds allows). This optimization can be applied to any song in 1tracker now. This helped a bit, but still wasn't enough. So I also had to modify wtbeep and SquatM formats.

In the wtbeep, I now omit the 0 byte for rows without a drum (it is now triggered by the bit 6 of the control word). Saves a bit of room.

In the SquatM, I reworked the way how the dividers stored. Instead of the normal LSB/MSB order that is easy to read with POP I stored them in the MSB/LSB order, and used bit 7 of the MSB as the note rest flag. The LSB is omited for note rests. This of course made the song data parser very suboptimal, but the Sqeeker-like design does not suffer from row transition noise much, and I gained the remaining bits of the RAM.

The largest songs remained the same, but I saved a couple K this way. Freezing point is 16714 now, and Geostorm is 15809 (2768 and 2500 packed).

Thanks, guys!

Interestingly, both Geostorm and High Orbit started as NES tracks, they were half finished sketches (half length of the finished versions) written for a game that never happened, lying around since 2017 I think. I thought they won't translate into 1-bit well, because the NES of course used volumes, duty cycle, slow attacks, samples, and so on. But it turned out to be the case when moving a song sketch that is just stalled in one format into another format made it shine.

Sure, you can upload it. WTFPL/CC0 it is.

v0.32 is out, with many improvements. Relatively major changes in the front-end code here and there. wtbeep and Squat family support got updates. Most importantly, Velvet engine has been added.

The full results are up, here are the beeper ones:

ZX Spectrum Beeper Music

1.   7.51   Freezing Point by Shiru
2.   7.11   Geostorm by Shiru
3.   7.03   March Of The BioMech by Tufty ^ 1bit Forum
4.   5.97   drum'n'halt by utz ^ irrlicht project
5.   5.76   Rekcart by AER
6.   5.61   babka_dance by AER

I was thinking to get it working on the 2600, too, using a trick to get a reasonably well tuned notes, but left it out for possible future updates, otherwise it could stay in the unreleased limbo for even longer.