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I suspect I'm actually rehashing some old idea, just been experimenting with the phase shift to control volumes yet again. This snippet produces interesting harmonics as the volume rises very smoothly:

    ld hl,0
    ld bc,1200    ;frequency
    ld ix,0
    ld a,0
    
loop1
    ld d,0
loop

    add hl,bc
    jp nc,$+5
    xor 16
    add ix,bc
    jp nc,$+4
    xor a
    
    out (#fe),a
    
    inc d
    jp nz,loop
    
    inc hl   ;slowly increase the volume
    
    jp loop

Volume control here is made of two 16-bit adders that get the same 16-bit value added (3 register pairs per oscillator). The first one inverts the phase, the second one resets it. Volume controlled by the distance between initial values of the adders.

Yes, something of this kind is certainly in my plains, with use of all the 1-bit VSTs and some of the old engines, too.

Oh my, it's been two years now. Two years of 'I'm too tired today, will get back to a song tomorrow'.

At least a new related thing, sampled all three known engines as a SF2 pack. May come handy in prototyping a song with a modern tool, or to bring up these pretty unique sounds into a modern mix.

This engine continues to fascinate me a lot, and although I haven't released anything made with it yet, I had an idea to sample its sounds into a SoundFont (sf2), to be able to use it in a modern DAW without going full on with writing a custom VST (it would need built-in Z80 emulation, doable, but would take much longer - saved it for later).

May come handy to someone - download here. It is a clean version, no carrier hiss there.

I deal with this kind of feedback since 2007 or so, so yeah. Still difficult to stay cool at times.

A while back, way before I took the VST route, I had a desire to support LMMS, which was the best free FL-style DAW out there. I come to their IRC channel and started to ask questions, like, how to make native plugins, are there people who would want it. They said - nah, do VST instead. So I did eventually, and I guess it has been a good advice, after all.

I'm doing a really niche stuff that is barely getting any feedback, and it is a truly demotivating thing. Moving to a niche platform with much lesser user base, especially of the target audience (music producers), that is also happens to have no money to offer (zero job offers for desktop *nix in two decades for me), is a sure way to kill any and all remaining desire to do anything at all. x64 support is just a necessary evil to keep it up now, and it is relatively easy to do.

A true story: in 2002 or so I had to break any interaction with a friend, because he moved to Linux completely (he's a web designer, so GIMP and a text editor was all he needed) and developed a habit of calling me even so often and spend long hours simply repeatedly telling me that I should drop Windows ASAP, and start to program for Linux, because Linux is the new greatest thing in universe and Windows is shit and going to die out soon anyway. This kind of advertising worked very well in alienating me from this stuff up to this day.

No, if I had something, I sure would publish it already. At the moment, the only game I can think of that kind of used this approach was Sea Dragon port, where I did beeper effects. It used very crude sample-like effects, like every so often during rendering a frame the game just read a bit from an array and outputted it. As it was 50 hz targeted, rendering speed was relatively steady, thus 'sample rate' was steady enough too. I don't have this code around, and can't really recall how many times per frame the routine was called. I think it was the least possible number, to avoid introducing slowdowns. Maybe 8-16 updates per frame.

It is possible to modify, but this sound effect approach specifically designed to be called repeatedly each interrupt or each game loop - to play sounds alongside the gameplay, in trade for (relatively) poor sound quality.

A shameless plug, you can use my BeepFX routines that is capable to much more sophisticated effects, but stop action while they're playing. As far as I know, it was hooked up to z88dk already: https://github.com/z88dk/z88dk/wiki/beepfx

Thanks for report. Will take a look and figure it out whenever I'll get time to do another chunk of updates.

Reaper PCSPE export works like a log recorder. You start export, start playing music like usual, plugin catches in realtime all it receives from MIDI tracks and writes down all the data that it produces and that goes into emulated PC Speaker registers. That's the same way some YM2612 plugins work. Once you got BIN or other file format, you can make a simple player program that will just send the pre-recorded data to actual PC Speaker port. There is an example of QBasic program alongside PCSPE that does just that. If anyone needs, I sure can provide help with implementing player in other language or for other needs.