1-bit on the Vtech Laser210/310 and VZ200/VZ300 Z80 computers. (Page 1 of 2)

Hi Bushy, welcome aboard!

Glad to see someone being so enthusiastic about 1-bit sound And great to have you doing all these engine ports. My first successful attempt at 1-bit code was a Huby port as well I'm sure after a while you'll figure out how to write your own engines as well. If you have any questions, feel free to ask, of course.

I'll see if I can dig up some .1tm files from my archive and send them your way. Unfortunately Gmail has a nasty habit of blocking attachments of unknown file types, so if you don't receive a mail from me please let me know here.

...four months later :

The four engines in BinTracker (Betaphase, PhaserX, PhaseSqueek and Pytha engines) took only minutes to change over and all four are now working on the VZ. The ~seven demo songs that came with Bintracker play nicely within both MESS and VZEM emulators. I have not yet had the chance to try on real hardware, however, can not see any reason why they would not work.
Unfortunately I haven't taken any video/youtube of these playing as of yet --- I will video real hardware when I get the chance.

Have made four "Huby musicbox" programs, each with around eight to ten Huby tunes, each tune selected by menu option. My limited programming methods limit the maximum program size to 32k; hence why I have four separate programs. However, having around ~38 music tunes , just off the Huby engine, is pretty cool.

Still wanting to try to convert Stocker and Q-Chan engines.

Engines now working on the VZ / Laser:
Huby
ZX10
POWW
Earthshaker
Earshaker
LSEngine
Ntropic
Pytha
Octonode
Betaphase
PhaseX
PhaseSqueek

Buzzkick : not working yet.
ZX7: Not yet working
Plipplop : not yet working

cheers

I will attempt to get some more tunes playing on real hardware  very shortly in the next week.
Have managed to convert quite a number of other engines over, however, some are extremely noisy because I just can't get the timing right yet.

I finally, after a number of hours and umpteen assesmbles, managed to get Tritone working very nicely with the song "Journey" that is included in the way-depths of the _Development directory in Z88DK. Sounds pretty cool.

Something like WTFX, ...and me not having the asm experience necessary, what would be the best recommendation in this instance?
The changing of all of the ZX's "OUT(C),A" to the VZ's "LD ($6800), A"   <or>  "LD [reg],$6800 / LD ( [reg] ), A"
...and then thusly fixing the timing ?   For this Frame 1 through to Frame 5?

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Doh! I can't even get the bbs tag working for the screenshot.
Screenshot of WTFX asking for suggested code or pointers is here : https://imgur.com/a/RWgdHht

cheers
Dave

Thanks heaps Utz.

Have played around with moving bits 3 & 4 to our bits 0 and 7 in WT and also changed your listed hex within all of the sample files - alas, there really wasn't any improvement unfortunately. I'm guessing I'm just missing something. I also played with shifting bits 3&4 in some of the other engines that I haven't managed to get any audio out yet; so far with little success, but I'll keep at it as I'm still currently really enthused in all of this. Whenever I find any spare time I just tinker with various ideas to no end to try to get something working.

I also did actually finally get around to start to properly count cycles for the heck of it, for the replacement LD opcode instead of ZX's OUT; trying to get the code in blocks of 8-states. Has improved sound quality in one or two engines; Still needs a lot more time spent into it, so it might be worthwhile me in doing this to all current players that I have working to reduce noise.

A few very rough grabs of a few engines playing on an Emulator are shown below. Sorry for the useless video and audio capturing, but does give a rough indication of the varying engines that I've managed to get working.

https://youtu.be/_5EdaxGSf4U            Tritone. Song: Journey.
https://youtu.be/eH4I1I7XuJo            Tritone FX
https://youtu.be/oDN6jTbStY8            PhaserX. Song:  Frohen Mohawk
https://youtu.be/aimDaYDt2FU            PhaserX. Song: Last Summer, with equaliser demo.
https://youtu.be/PE52gYiFWw4            Pytha.
https://youtu.be/ZyS1Vlr1jX0        Quadtropic with lores and hi-res equaliser.
https://youtu.be/Stm_25S97zk            Betaphase
https://youtu.be/uFYL9rsO410            VZ demo game with ZX10 engine
https://youtu.be/EQDAdN9sNFs    PhaserSqueek

Phasersqueek is the best sounding engine yet. It is just clean and crisp, and was just a cinch to convert. And I was gobsmacked upon the first running and hearing it.

PhaserX, Quadtropic, ZX and Huby seem to be the engines that can be used for games / demos without effecting performance too much. Trying to run the same code for the text equaliser in Pytha, Phasersqueek, Beta, Octonode etc just either fails from my lack of programming knowledge or the VZ simply doesn't have enough grunt to do whatever as well as the music engine.

I really want to get zbmod working; however, have already had two separate good attempts at it now, and unfortunately both were a failure.

Another 20 minutes later, and Velvet is partially working.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Uca64kg5r4

A slight update:
Bushy managed to get POWW working on a real VZ300 computer. I've changed a bit of the code so you can call one part to initialize the tune and another to keep playing it with repeated calls. It means I can incorporate it in a C program loop and have the computer do other things while playing the tune.
Sadly, there's only one demo tune for POWW so I'll have to work out how to make some music in 1tracker for it and see if I can get anything good out of it.
No other 1bit engine will play on a real VZ300 at this stage.

I'm not much familiar with the Savage code, and it is super convoluted to figure it out at quick glance, but it looks like it relies to IM2 handler a lot. Simply removing it certainly won't work. The engine can be rewritten (recreated) to work without interrupts, I think, but it is more like making a new engine from scratch than a simple edit.

A friend of mine theorises that since the ZX has a real speaker and the vz has the piezo electric one it may be that the VZ needs to run at higher frequencies to create sound when toggling the bits. Or much longer durations

Engines using the pulse interleaving technique (Savage, Tritone, many others) most likely will not work on piezos. Pulse interleaving relies on inertia of the speaker cone, which is practically absent on piezos. So only engines using OR mixing (Squeeker, Squeeker Plus, PhaseSqueek, Squat) and maybe pin pulse engines will work.

That said, VZ also has tape out, right? I'd focus on using that for sound instead of the piezo.

Yeah

Seems the most important code to make sound:

LD A,($783B)
LD D,A
XOR $21
LD ($6800),A
LD A,D
LD ($6800),A

Qchan is pin pulse so in theory it should work. However, it may be too quiet to be properly audible, or maybe the pulses will be too short to actually switch the piezo. Could also be that the volume envelopes don't quite work as intended because some piezos have a pretty strong overshoot. Nevertheless, it's worth a try methinks. Same goes for the Octode family (except Octode PWM and Octode2k16, those are pulse interleaving), Stocker, Huby, and BuzzKick.