next gen engine ideas (Page 1 of 6)

Hi utz

I wondered how long it would be before you were itching to write another engine

Here are some ideas I have had, if any are of any use or spark debate.

I like the Qchan type engines but if more bass or better drums were possible this would be great. The best part of Qchan (for me) are the volume envelopes as I think this opens the door for interesting synth effects.

I would like to see an engine where different types are selectable from within the tune itself. A sort of multi-engine that can swap between (for example) a phaser sound to a basic rom beep sound to maybe a PFM sound in the middle of a tune. I think this would enable tunes to have sections in different styles and make them more interesting.

A useful feature would be for a tune to quit back to basic at predetermined points in the music (to maybe allow text to be displayed) and then the user could jump back into the tune at the point it left off.

OK, wacky idea. How about a drum and bass engine with basically mega bass and a selection of drums/hihats etc.  Maybe 2 mega bass channels or even just one with digi-drums ????

Just a thought.

Always itching, just don't always have the time

Here are some ideas I have had, if any are of any use or spark debate.

Yup, same here. It would especially be great to have a (pseudo-)white noise channel along the pin pulse channels. Well, as I mentioned I've got an enhanced Qchan version in the works, which will feature full envelope control similar to Stocker. It should have some more bass, too, using introspec's technique from Octode XL. Though perhaps I should start studying Zilogat0r's Squeeker code more closely, as that would allow for even more bass.

Yeah, been longing for something like that as well. However, my conclusion is that this is a problem to be solved at the editor end of things. If I'm not mistaken most of Shiru's engines could already be used in that fashion, as they are tuned to 440Hz (unlike mine cause I suck at math ). So it's basically Beepola and/or 1tracker that would need to support this feature.

A few engines, like Wham and Music Studio already support this feature. Nevertheless it's a good point for other/new engines, and it isn't even that difficult to achieve.

qoap and yawp would be capable of doing that. But again, the problem is that there aren't any editors yet that support the full feature set of these engines. And unfortunately the whole editor business is a bit over my head, can't even figure out how to do plugins for 1tracker.

Hehe, I do my live performances with some black metal vocals So +1 for your idea!

How about kind of groovebox for ZX of for instance qaop engine ? I will be playing my first ever chip gig in March here in Finland, would be really cool to play 1-bit realtime engine !!

Yes, thought so. I am planning (but not sure if I am able to finish) to make a version without graphics, ie. without display at all, just CPU/keyboard, 16 steps, all controls from keyboard, changing samples/beats and pitches during performance. Let's see, I need to write in C/Basic (z88dk, Boriel) and include assembly as inline, not exactly something I am competent

Yes, it would, and makes things easier many ways (including traveling etc). To write all in asm would take too much time, I would need to learn more in short span of time, not much time to the gig, and I really would like to play 1-bit stuff there (too, I am also writing programs to Gameboy and possibly to some third device as well). I thought to put engine as inline asm, write rest, timing, realtime mods etc, with C or Basic. Like music.asm part in realtime, possible to modify pitch/drum data on the fly.

Coool, thanks utz ! Can I ask source code for this, might be useful as it contains keyboard reading etc, I could learn some assembly same way !

Thanks utz, very cool small code, undestand it mostly, need to check few opcodes I don't know. The sendspace link doesn't work, possibly date limit expired.

!!

Like the sound in the example. As you say, a pretty clean sound but still retaining the synth timbre from a pfm engine. Could be a very interesting new engine ! 

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

Very impressive. There is like 100 engines already, but beeper continues to amaze. So does utz.

Not yet, did some experiments, wasn't really satisfied, but I'm going to try some more.

Thanks mate!

Seems I omitted part of the formula for the low-pass. It should be

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

In any case it's a lovely algorithm, because with the multi-core digi synthesis I'm using lately it can be implemented without using any extra registers.