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Hmm, seems the bugs in the quattropic converter have finally vanished.

In the meantime, I've updated the nanobeep engine. The player has now been reduced to 77 bytes, and "light" (73B) and "ultra" (56B) versions have been added. "Light" has somewhat reduced sound quality, but otherwise still the full feature set. "Ultra", on the other hand, is cutting some corners, ie. no border masking, no click drum, and no looping. Also, there was a bug in the converter which has been fixed.

@Shiru: Well, Follin's engine is virtually unusable, and I've used ZX-10 excessively (and everybody else hates it). But, I see your point and agree. tBeepr and Beep Tracker would also fall under the "age limit", so yep, best use an "excluding" list.

@Tufty: Hehe, that'd be a pretty damn long list by now Think it's indeed best to do a list with disallowed engines, and for the rest direct users to http://randomflux.info/1bit/viewtopic.php?id=25. (I have to check if that one's actually up to date though).

@garvalf: There once was a -rather successful- Beeper BotB battle. But it was a one-time thing, quite sure I'd have a hard time convincing puke7 to host another one any time soon considering how packed the battle schedule is nowadays. Anyway BotB does a good job of drawing attention to 1-bit music either way, seeing how zxbeep is now one of the most popular formats on there aside from the "big ones" (nsf*, s3xmodit, wild).

Ok, I'll try to make a start on "the" list then.
The following engines would be disallowed:

- FuzzClick (Special FX/Orfeus)
- Huby
- Music Studio
- Octode (should that include the XL, 2k15 and PWM variants?)
- Qchan
- Phaser1
- ROMbeep
- Savage (should include newcore imo)
- Tritone
- Wham! The Music Box

Any others I forgot? What about ZX-7, -10, and -16? ZX-7 has been used quite a bit in the old days. For the rest we had the Tribute compilation, so those engines have had their spotlight already. I think we might also want to give a "recommended" list, which should include Phaser 2/3, fluidcore, and perhaps quattropic.

Edit: Squeeker and BT'man need more love, too, imo.

That's a very reasonable idea. However, for the time being my motivation to organize another compo is near 0. Perhaps we could collaborate with the Spanish folks from Culturachip, though. Like, handle the submissions through them, but use our more transparent approach to voting. I mean the main idea of the last forum compo was to attract more people to the forum, and it clearly flopped (not just) in that respect. And I don't think that would change with a different ruleset.

Regarding allowed engines, I think the easiest would be to draw the line at Phaser2, eg. all engines released prior to that would be prohibited. The only drawback would be that this would exclude Stocker. (I've got a -somewhat conceptual- Stocker project in the works, though ) What do you think?

Cheers Hehe, maybe not to my creativity, but unfortunately there are quite some limits to my maths skills, which is providing some major stumbling blocks lately. Trying to read some stuff on DSP at the moment, mostly not understanding the slightest bit about the mathematical theory of it. Wish I could just go into recluse and just study that stuff for a few years.

Cheers guys! Yes, I'm pretty sure there's more that can be done with the beeper. I'm just kind of running out of (feasible) ideas again.

Right now I'm doing some tests with dynamic duty cycles, but that seems to be surprisingly unuseful. I mean you can do some nice chords with it (Earth Shaker style), but other than that implementing an extra counter for the duty cycle seems to have little advantage over just incrementing the duty setting once per sound loop, like I do in Houstontracker. The extra registers needed for full duty cycle control can be put to better use elsewhere imo.

One thing I'm still pondering about is the Jan Deak's buffer based method. I mean it's blazingly fast, but what uses could it have besides generating a truckload of pin pulse channels?

Also, Shiru, did you get any further with your Fuzz Click/Music Box hybrid?

A new breakthrough! Just implemented a low-pass filter. Check out the attached .tap - first pattern is without the filter, second with low-pass enabled.

The low-pass is implemented with this simple algo:

y[i] = a(x[i] - y[i-1])

where y is the actual output volume level, x is the unfiltered output, and a is a (time-related) constant, in this case 0.25. Using a = 0.125 gives better results, but I'd need to implement more volume levels to use it.

I tried implementing a high-pass, too, but so far no luck on that, because the algo for that can produce negative values (unlike the low-pass one where the result will always be >=0). The high-pass algo I have is

y[i] = a(y[i-1] + x[i] - x[i-1]) 

Any idea how to modify it so it'll always produce positive results? I could probably invert the output but that'd be too slow I think.

EDIT: Nevermind, got it. The current implementation is ugly as hell, but hey, it works

Ok, so most of you have probably all seen this elsewhere already:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVGYi-46G2s
http://irrlichtproject.de/downloads/dmg5th.gb

Good old pulse interleaving on the 2nd DMG channel while resuming normal operation on the other channels. Been meaning to do this for a long time, and it was also clear early on that this would have to be some sort of an April Fool's prank - so thanks for inspiring me, garvalf

So, lessons learned? Well, 1-bit sound is possible on the Gameboy. But, as Shiru mentioned, the Gameboy CPU is... eh... not exactly great to work with if you want to do something out of the ordinary. Not only does it miss more than half the Z80 registers, but also a lot of useful opcodes aren't implemented, and the ones that are there are almost always slower than on a regular Z80. HRAM is a nice feature but doesn't make up for the drawbacks. So the possibilities for 1-bit  on Gameboy are very limited. One could probably pull off a third 1-bit channel with a lot of fiddeling and loop unrolling, but overall I have to conclude that this platform really isn't worth it as far as 1-bit music is concerned.

Hi mate,
Sorry, I don't know this particular program. Was it monophonic, or did it do multi-channel music?
In any case, there is some old PC Speaker stuff here: http://cd.textfiles.com/psl/pslmonthly2 … /mus_spkr/
Also, Will Harvey's Music Construction Set had the Entertainer as a demo tune, you can probably find that on some abandonware site.

Agreed, for some engines the IO contention adds some very pleasant overtones/harmonics to the sound.

Yeah, composite only is a downer, but I can kind of understand why. HDMI is not feasible for this kind of projects, because of the insane licensing fees (5000 USD per year + 1 USD per unit). VGA on the other hand is pretty much as outdated as composite, so they were probably thinking "why add another legacy port". But I agree, would have been nice-to-have.

Not using RCA for audio on the other hand is indeed a bad choice, didn't realize they use jack.

Whoops, that sold out quickly! Well, good for them. I think it's an excellent project at a very fair price, made by some very experienced people.