7 days, 7 (new) beeper engines (Page 1 of 3)

Nice. At first I thought it was an attempt at PDM what's with the OUTI's and all, then I realized it was a clever way to set the PWM 'level balance' depending on where you begin in the memory. Overall, this technique is strangely underused. My Vvv (the saw wave player) is based on a similar idea albeit realized with a set of routines

Looking forward to your other entries, too

Two great engines so far Utz

I love the lofi sound and volume control of qaop (btw any chance of including the xm / tap of the demo tune from soundcloud ? Would be great to know how it sounds on a real Speccy and how you wrote it)

Quattropic is really great too, I love the sound, general tone, bass and balanced percussive sounds.

Can't wait for the next five

Thanks for the cheers, guys

I've found and (hopefully) fixed a few bugs in the qaop and quattropic XM converters, so please re-download.
Also, I've added a standalone executable converter to the quattropic package, so now you can do things without using Perl. However, I just started to learn C++ yesterday, so it's probably loaded with bugs. But I'd still appreciate if you guys gave it a try and let me know if you run into any problems with it.

New engine for today is coming in a couple of hours, stay tuned

Eyyup, here we go again:

Day 3: xtone

- 6 channels of square wave sound
- limited duty cycle control
- 16-bit frequency resolution
- 3 interrupting click drum sounds
- per-row speed control
- 16.2 KHz mixing

example tune
download (includes XM converter as usual)
source

Now we're getting serious xtone is basically like Tritone, but with 6 channels. Inevitably, the sound is quite a bit grittier though, and duty cycle
control is less accurate, though you still get at least 4 different settings.

Ouch... xm template added. I have a hard time staying focussed these days

Day 4: Octode 2k15

- 8 channels of PFM sound
- 16-bit frequency resolution
- 3 interrupting click drums
- per-row speed control
- 15.6 KHz mixing

example tune (think I overdid the EQing a bit on this one, sorry)
download (includes XM converter of course)
source

I realized I hadn't written a PFM engine in ages, so something needed to be done... Octode 2k15 is a rewrite of Shiru's Octode which fixes the detuning issues of the original by using 16-bit counters. The sound has also been improved, and resembles that of Octode XL with all channel volumes set to like ~5-6 or so. Unlike with Octode XL, volumes can't be changed though. To somewhat make up for it, I added per-row speed control.
Another downside is that the song data is huge, so the maximum song length would be about thirty 64-step patterns. That goes for yesterday's engine, too, btw.
You can feed original Octode XMs into Octode 2k15, but you'll need to adjust speed and pitch. XMs from Octode XL will not be compatible, though.

Ah, thanks Tufty, I'll fix the links right away. In the meantime...

Day 5: Octode PWM

- 8 channels of square wave sound, sort of
- 16-bit frequency resolution
- 4 octaves note range
- 3 interrupting click drums
- per-row speed control
- 19 KHz mixing

example tune
download (yes, includes converter)
source

Another, more experimental version of Octode, with a different sound. It's quite noisy though, I guess mixing 8 square wave channels is a little too much for our beloved Speccy. Well, at least it can serve as a bad example

Ok, one last engine release...

Day 7: nanobeep

- 2 channels of PFM sound
- ~3 octaves range
- 8-bit frequency resolution
- 1 interrupting click drum
- player size 86 bytes

example tune
download (includes XM converter, surprise surprise)
source

Not the most useful engine on the planet, but hey, I had to fill up the 7 days of the week somehow This is my attempt at making an engine with a size below 100 bytes. As the counters are 8-bit, there are of course detuning issues, but unlike with Huby, they occur at both ends of the note range. Notes from the middle of the first octave onwards to mid-4th should be reasonably stable though. Also, a few bass notes (C, D, G) are safe to use.
The keyhandler doesn't check the whole keyboard (only Space,A,Q, and 1), if you find this to be unacceptable it'll cost you 2 additional bytes to fix that.

And thus ends the "7 days, 7 engines" project. Thanks everybody for checking it out

thanks for all of those new engines. With them we have matter for creating new amazing sounds and tunes!

For xtone, in the doc "Drums may be in any channel, but you cannot set more than one per row." => I noticed if the drums are not in channel 7 or 8, but in channel 1 to 6, then in addition to the drum sound, you'll get extra notes, probably it's not wanted.

You are on fire, mate

I missed a lot!

Hi johnl

Welcome aboard, great to see you here

Thanks a lot for the bandcamp support too