The mighty Protodome! Welcome to the board smile

Atmega is a very nice chip, and it's certainly capable of outputting polyphony on a single pin. Provided you're willing to program it in assembly, that is. A pin pulse routine might even be feasible in C, but I think what you'd rather want is a tight, timing-stable loop that alternates between the various software outputs (aka Pulse Interleaving). I suppose you have read the tutorial thread? That contains pretty much most of the known tricks, and should be applicable to Atmega as well.

If not, please specify a bit more what you want to do, I'm sure we can work something out smile

827

(135 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Feeling the itch again to write some new engines, but I'm in need of some fresh ideas. So, if you have any suggestions for features you'd like to see in a beeper engine, please drop them here, no matter how crazy!

Aside from making a converter for Zilogat0r's engine, and hopefully finishing Qchan FX, there are a few things I've got on my list. One thing is to do more with wavetable synthesis. I've been playing around with a new trick I learned from one of the Dragon/CoCo guys, which helps to speed up the code from qoap/yawp by quite a bit, but I'm not terribly thrilled by the results so far.

Another thing is to do more research into volume control. Alone Coder has done some test implementations of my phase shifting idea, but that actually generated a range of new problems that need to be solved.

Furthermore, I really would like to make an engine that mimicks the sound of an overdriven guitar/bass with variable sound characteristics. In theory, that would require a method of outputting band-limited noise. However, I have no clue how to pull that off so far.

In general, I somehow have the feeling there must be more ways of manipulating sound over time. The Phaser engines are certainly a good start, but that can't be everything.

828

(7 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Seems to me that the MiST version has a tad too much high end/fuzz. And yeah, it does sound somewhat colder. I suspect the emulation of the ULA and it's auxilliary components isn't totally accurate yet.

hmm, crazy Fins, huh?
I actually joined wanted.scene.org very early on, and I certainly do keep an eye on it smile But sadly I went on vacation without my scene.org password. Missed a couple of things there in the past weeks, grrr.

830

(111 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Hmm, normally the organizers react pretty quickly, so it was probably a good idea to resend it.
If you don't hear from the guys, you could also try mailing your entry directly to lvd.

831

(111 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Oh shi.... I thought the deadline was tomorrow. Just came back from Germany a few hours ago, hope my submission will still be received.

832

(7 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Glad to hear about the improvements in the MiST core. I'm not into fpga devices myself, but the MiST certainly seems like an excellent choice given the range of platforms it supports. Please do upload some recordings if you have the time, I'm curious how well it performs.

833

(6 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Neat! Totally not a Robbie Williams fan, but you managed to make even this music sound pleasant to my ears smile

Very nice find, garvalf!
Still got an old Palm laying around somewhere, but so far I hadn't considered making music on it. Maybe I should think again...

835

(3 replies, posted in General Discussion)

There's also this: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=30929
They even released an editor for this, can't find it right now though.

Generally speaking, loading on the ZX is costs quite a bit of CPU, since it all the timing has to be done software. So it's not an ideal candidate for combining with 1-bit music, though I don't think it's impossible. It's certainly far more complicated than updating some soundchip's registers once per frame though wink

836

(111 replies, posted in Sinclair)

No, you don't need to anonymize your entries. Usually the music works are presented anonymously though (ie screen$ will not be displayed).

837

(8 replies, posted in General Discussion)

The spambot questions are done via a plugin in punBB, and it appearantly that plugin isn't very customizable at all. But afaik it still shouldn't ask questions except when signing up. Iirc we had the same setup at the old place, and it wasn't a problem there, right? I guess the problem is rather that the plugin isn't communicating properly with the punBB API.

In any case, let's wait for the update (thanks already d0x10) and see what happens.

838

(8 replies, posted in General Discussion)

Very odd, seems like a bug to me. You should have to answer this only once, when signing up. I hope d0x10 will find the time to update to the latest PunBB version soon. Thanks for bringing it to my attention, in any case.
Afaik we do get a fair share of bots attempting to sign up, so I'd rather not remove this otherwise highly effective measure. (Especially not considering I won't have regular internet access for the rest of the year - might consider removing it when I'm back home in January though).

Hehe, sneaky! Thanks, I might very well implement that, with due credit of course.

Generally speaking, timer updates are quite regularly getting in my way somehow. I'd very much love to find an alternative to the usual 16-bit counter update. Though on the other hand, splitting it into two parts like we usually do (dec lo, jp nz, dec hi, jp nz) provides a handy way for doing small data updates on the fly (think effects).

Arrgh, removing the border masking of course. I should've seen that.
How do you feel about border masking, from an aesthetic viewpoint? Over the years I've come to the conclusion that it is indeed quite unnecessary. In fact, almost every time I leave it out I get "nice border effects!" as a comment.

841

(10 replies, posted in Sinclair)

I think Chris Cowley did some testing with this some years ago and also came to the conclusion that is isn't worth it. (The thread is somewhere on WOS but I can't find it). I still think it might be interesting to perhaps use it for a reverb effect of sorts, but yeah, the unreliability of the effect across hardware revisions is quite a drawback.

Side note - I faintly remember actually using this in one of my engines, to balance the volume between drums and tones. Not that it really helped tongue

842

(22 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Interesting, thanks for clearing this up. Might explain why my attempts of contacting the guys behind this have failed so far big_smile I still wonder how those envelopes on the third/fourth screen are done though? Do they shift the volume on interrupts?

Regarding your Squeeker hack, well, I should probably say I absolutely love the sound of the original, there's something very special to it. Sorry, can't describe it better. Leaving that aside, your "like_original" version sounds quite nice to my ears. In the "like_octode_xl" version on the other hand, the mids are too metallic for my taste. But then again, as you know my taste is rather, eh, peculiar wink

Ok, then we have no choice but to duel it out big_smile big_smile big_smile
I just had a glance at my 7d7 engines, seems it would be possible in more cases than I thought, though I don't see it for all of them, namely not quattropic and xtone (and especially the latter would actually benefit greatly from it). Well, I'll definately give it more thought in the future, though I'm still not totally convinced. As a matter of fact, I've got a new, very fast wavetable player in the works where it definately won't work, as the sound core consists of little more than repeatedly doing out (#fe),a, rrca wink

844

(22 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Aww yes! Thanks a lot, introspec. I love the sound of this engine, and with your explanation, I can finally make a converter for the engine (though it'll probably have to wait till I come back from my traditional end-of-the-year album recording session, and provided Shiru doesn't beat me to it with a 1tracker plugin).

Judging by sound, I suspect Spectone-1 (http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0007879, the engine that can be heard eventually when leaving the menu screen with key A and going further on from there) might operate on a similar principle?

845

(10 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Aye, still sounds good even when not listening from a Vega tongue Think I've asked this before, but which speech synth is that?

Also, I couldn't possibly imagine what the intro tune is based on big_smile big_smile big_smile

Yeah, I find that with pin pulse engines, you can usually get away with breaking most, if not all of the "rules".
That aside, please don't get me wrong - I don't doubt that observing this would lead to a major sound improvement. What I mean is that with the kind of >3 channel PuInt and especially wavetable synthesis, it's pretty much impossible to pull off the correct 8t alignments. Which shouldn't deter us from writing those kind of engines wink Nevertheless I'm looking forward to a potential "Savage Ultra" wink

Btw, if you find some time, could you write up something: The theoretical basis for writing a multi-channel routine for 16K Speccy. Been meaning to make one for ages, but I just can't wrap my head around it.

847

(5 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Wow, that is even more hardcore than composing in assembler! Hmmm, next time you feel like composing something with your routine (and I very much hope you do feel like that sometimes wink), have a look at this software. Being familiar with trackers, you might find that a little more convenient than hacking in DATA statements, hehe. I'm not sure if it provides the same level of flexibility though.

Also yes, the Arc of Yesod tune is quite a gem smile

848

(111 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Yo lvd, thanks for the info! I'll try my best to make something, though I can't promise it atm. My schedule is packed until January and I don't have any unreleased material that's demoparty-worthy.

Aye, added this to the post. Going by my experiences with 7d7e I'd say this may be considered more as a general guideline for "optimal design", rather than something that needs to be strictly adhered to (like the "stable timing" rule). Nevertheless it's a viable piece of information, so thanks for pointing this out!

I have some plans to extend this tutorial a bit further, but at the moment I lack the time to do so. Think it'll have to wait till next year. Of course everybody else is welcome to add parts, too.

850

(5 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Welcome to the 1-bit forum! Great to have you aboard.

Very happy to hear those unreleased 1-bit tracks! The tracker conversions are excellent as well. I'm not much of a gamer myself, but I think some people would go nuts if World Shaker ZX was to be released one day. Seems the PC version was never widely distributed either?

Also, how did you compose the music back in the day, actually? Did you hard-code it all in asm?