Better than the original chrchrchr

2

(21 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Cheers MovieMovies1, it was fun working with you on this wink
I think the .exe you posted dynamically links msvcrt.dll, which may not be present on systems without Visual Studio installed. I've attached a stand-alone version below that shouldn't require any additional .dlls.

3

(21 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Thanks for figuring stuff out! I should get some sleep, but here's one last quick attempt before I do that.

D'oh! Screwed it up again if I'm not mistaken. Ctrl+F "0.25", change to "0.125", if you wanna compile yourself, otherwise I'll upload a new binary tomorrow.

4

(21 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Whoops, actually paying attention while compiling may help lol

Edit: Added the upgraded E5x support, as discussed. Pls let me know if it works as intended.

5

(21 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Ah yes, of course. I was completely fixated on non-standard tunings somehow. I suppose overall pitch could be made configurable through a command line switch.

Edit: Variable pitch implemented. xm2tritone now takes a value for the CPU speed as an optional second argument after the filename.

6

(135 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Multimatograf will have a beeper compo again this year.
https://events.retroscene.org/mf2025
Deadline is May 2nd, 12:00 local time.

7

(21 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Hmm, having a range of -1 - +⅞ semitune would make sense from a "least surprise" pov, I guess. Otoh we could have twice the resolution if we do half of that range, since with the former setup, ranges actually overlap. Then again I'm not entirely sure it's even possible to represent that with 16-bit frequency resolution. Hmm... I'll work something out and then you can test to see what works best for you.

As far as custom tuning goes, that'd be a bit more involved, so I'd rather pass on that for now, even though I would very much like to have that available myself. Bintracker will eventually support that kind of thing, hopefully.

8

(21 replies, posted in Sinclair)

I think I could hack something like it into the converter. What exactly should those 15 steps in E5x represent, though? E58 is no detune of course and then I guess E50 should represent -¼ tone and E5F should represent +¼ tone. I don't like the idea of having a lookup for this, so I'd prefer to have a formula in the form of

freq = freq_base + (E5x_param - 8) * something_something

9

(21 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Wooo MovieMovies1, long time no see! Fantastisk track, still rocking the beeper like a boss, I see wink

10

(166 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Hi, after playing around with Archie in 1tracker a bit, I decided to modify the engine plugin a little to better suit my needs. Sharing the modded engine here in case someone else will find it useful.

The changes are:

- Applies half as much detune. x*2 detunes too much on an engine with 12-bit dividers, imo.
- Phase offsets are now log(x)-based. This is useful because it mirrors the relation between phase offset and volume, ie. we're mostly interested in values close to phase inversion.

Hi, FrankT pops in here once in a while, but not very often. I sent him a message, but I'm not sure I have his recent contacts. Otherwise, he also hangs out on https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/forums/ every now and then.

12

(5 replies, posted in Sinclair)

My apologies Shiru, I'm super pressed on time rn so haven't had the chance to test these. Just judging from Tufty's test track (also heard it without EQ) though, QC24 at least sounds amazing. I think absolutely nailed the volume balance between tones and drums this time.

13

(4 replies, posted in Sinclair)

So Lee gave you only 900 bytes, but then had room for a speech sample scratches head. Well done though, mate wink

14

(6 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Team Qchan represent! Also still one of my favourite engines. Those envelopes are magic.
Also classic Tufty style at it's finest.

15

(2 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Oh yeah! This one goes deep.

16

(1 replies, posted in Other Platforms)

I have some faint memories of The Invisible Man having written a custom driver for the TRS-80. I also have a pile of old music editors on my hd, don't think I ever actually tried any of them though yikes

bushy555 wrote:

Output: Bits 0-1: 00=0.85 Volts, 10=0.0 Volts, 01 = 0.46 Volts

So that thing actually has 3 volume levels! That could be interesting to explore. Though I wonder why the voltages are so low overall. Doesn't the Speccy output something like -5V?

Sigh... I'm still pissed about the whole story.

18

(1 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Some new beeps from teh h0ff:
https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=97217

19

(1 replies, posted in Sinclair)

I remember these ports making rounds a couple of years ago, though I can't remember either who did them. The problem is that none of these work on actual hardware, at least not without modifications to the board (including my 1k2b). An actual unmodded ZX81 will produce a loud static noise which drowns out any music played by the machine.

20

(135 replies, posted in Sinclair)

I think I have some appropriate material for this compo smile

Regarding looping PWM samples, I've got an idea for a design that would be relatively cycle-efficient. We need to check for the end marker anyway, right? If we put a loop pointer immediately after the end marker, that loop pointer could either point to the end marker itself (effectively stopping sample playback) or to some arbitrary position in the sample (actual loop). The only caveat is that the encoder needs to ensure that 1) the phase is not accidentally inverted by the loop, 2) state is 0 at the end of the sample, and maybe 3) the length of the last half-cycle before the end is reduced by 1. This would rule out extending PWM half-cycle length beyond 255, but I think we can live with that since we can pitch down anyway.

21

(135 replies, posted in Sinclair)

A dedicated noise channel might also be interesting (with fake volume control through the duty cycle approach, otherwise it will overpower the sample channels), because noise is expensive when PWM sampled.

I'm thinking dedicated tone channels might not even be necessary since they can be "emulated" with PWM samples. Even simple chords should not be too expensive in terms of memory usage. Maybe 3 sample channels can be done instead? Don't know how feasible that would be in terms of overloading. The same applies to additional tone channels, of course. For example, I tried using some longer breakbeat samples in Squat. That almost completely drowned out the tone channels.

22

(2 replies, posted in Other Platforms)

Thanks Detective Bushy wink I'm glad you're figuring out and sharing all these specifics.

23

(135 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Cheers guys! Great compo, lovely tracks from y'all. Hearing good old LSengine put a smile on my face.

I'm a bit surprised that Horseman scored comparatively low. I thought it was a very strong entry.

Regarding the samples, what surprised me is that those acid chirps worked so well, as in, they interfere much less with the tone channels than I was expecting. They took surprisingly little memory as well. This gave me an idea for a new engine, actually. How about just two channels of pitchable PWM samples or'ed together? With a bit of extra magic from the PWM encoder it should be quite flexible. As in - make 0 a special value instead of just an end marker - if followed by another 0, loop to the sample start (to enable tones), if followed by 1, stop sample playback, any other value = extend current half-cycle by n-2 samples. The converter should also invert the data if the total number "on" samples is greater than the total number of "off" samples.

24

(1 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Been talking to the guy on Spectrum Computing. Needless to say I'm happy to see some octode2k16 use as well.
That engine could definitely use some improvements though.

25

(135 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Yay, got one in as well. Alright, let's have a blast!