Search options (Page 21 of 39)

Hmm, that shouldn't be the case. There is some noise on the pure triangle, and the modulation effect has a pretty sharp sound, but it should be tolerable (unless my ears are getting bad). Are you running on hardware or Fuse emulator? Most other emulators have problems with this type of fast-switching synthesis.

Border masking would cost a lot of cycles, so unfortunately it's pretty much impossible.

Another 1-bit puzzle cracked: How to generate a triangle wave without wavetable lookup. There are some killer modulation effects that you can do with this as well, but I still need to find a few free t-states in order to implement those for 2 channels.

Edit: Ok, got it. Here's a shorter and faster version, 11 t-states free which will be enough to pull of the modulation effects.

sloop
    add hl,de        ;11
    
    ld a,0           ;7    ;timing
    nop              ;4    ;timing
    
    ld a,h           ;4
    rlca             ;4
    sbc a,a          ;4
    xor h            ;4
    
    rrca             ;4
    out (c),a        ;12__64
    rrca             ;4
    out (c),a        ;12__16
    ds 4             ;16
    rrca             ;4
    out (c),a        ;12__32
    
    jp sloop         ;10

Edit2: Example with modulation effect attached.

Awesome! Can't wait to see the full documentation for the Next. Guess I'll be writing a sound driver or two for this thing.

Thanks!

Did you have this discussion before they upgraded to the SLX16? Maybe at least OPL2 will be possible after all, who knows On the other hand, I'll probably stick to the beeper anyways. I need those limitations, with FM I'd just be stuck tweaking sounds all day.

Ha, neat. They even got a Sharp Pocket PC!

The Commodorians are actually blessed as far as live music coding goes, since they've got defMON

Yeah, programming natively on the thing is what I'm most looking forward to. As far as sound goes, I think the current specs are great already. And there's always the chance for an updated firmware later on

Also what? The Lyndon Sharp is active? I've been trying to get in touch with the man for ages, to no avail. He briefly popped up on WorldofSpectrum a while ago, but nobody gave a damn (unsurprisingly, as many people with a serious interest in Speccy things have left that place after the new management took over), so he disappeared from there again. If you could manage to reach out to him and lure him here, that'd be awesome. Not sure if he even knows that there are people actively using his beeper sound routine nowadays...

Haven't tried tasm_on_calc, but judging from the readme, it might not be very useful. It only implements a small subset of commands, and a lot of important stuff like logic, 16-bit arithmetic, relative jumps, and data directives aren't implemented at all. That said, the 84+ can be programmed natively in machine code. So you can always write your asm code on paper, and translate it by hand Quite tedious, but it's doable for small projects.

Houstontracker takes up most of the available RAM. However, on the 84+, you can always stuff things into the Flash archive to make room in the RAM. So it's certainly possible to use the same calc for music tracking and asm experiments.

Well, that certainly means taking the hard route On the other hand, I can completely understand your desire to stay away from "big" computers. In this case you may want to familiarize yourself with MRS (the Memory Resident System). It's one of the most advanced assemblers that run natively on the 48K, and it should work just fine in conjunction with the divSD.

Regarding the 48K sound, it actually is generated by the ULA chip, which also does the graphics. The ULA sends the signal to both the on-board speaker and the MIC output (and since the latter isn't fully seperated from the EAR port it's audible there as well, at a lower volume). Pretty much all the recordings available online are taken from the MIC port.

Like what I've seen so far of your works on vimeo, nice and dark. Will have to check out more of that

Well, I'd be more than happy to aid you in your quest to pick up assembly. We definately need more people writing their own sound routines.

Btw check out these:
Mastering Machine Code on Your ZX81, by Toni Baker - There's also a ZX Spectrum version of this book, but this one comes as a hyperlinked html version. Very handy, especially chapter 8.
How To Write ZX Spectrum Games, by Jonathan Cauldwell - Very useful once you've learned some basic assembly theory and are wondering how to put it into practise.

You'll also want a mnemonics table for a quick overview over all the available commands. I mostly use this one. It's missing a few undocumented opcodes, though. The definitive list of all Z80 opcodes is here.

Edit: Oh, and thanks for your contribution on bandcamp btw Glad to hear there's at least one person who actually likes my beeper poetry

Man, sucks to hear your stuff got stolen. But great to hear that doesn't discourage you!