• Shiru
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  • From: Russia, Moscow
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Topic: New engine: Ear Shaver

A new simple engine is made and added to 1tracker. Nothing too special, but it mixes a few features of various engines: the Earth Shaker engine sounding one (but implemented in a different way), two-channel Tritone-like engine, and sampled drums. This provides a major variety in the loudness, so it may get more dynamics to the 1-bit music.

The engine has two separate tone generation loops, either of those can be invoked for every row, both sharing the same register set to store accumulators and adders, as well as same timings (120t for sound loop, ~30 Khz sample rate). Technically even more different types of engines can be combined like that.

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  • utz
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Re: New engine: Ear Shaver

That's a neat idea, and very well executed.
I assume W setting has no effect for the ES engine, right? I'm wondering if it would be possible to use the value for something.
Generally speaking, I think such meta-engines are a very interesting concept. One question that comes to mind though is how to handle a variable number of parameters in a tracker. For example beepertoy can take on 2-8 channels depending on which engine is used. As far as I can tell that doesn't translate well to either 1te or mdalconf.

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  • Shiru
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Re: New engine: Ear Shaver

Yes, no effect for W (duty) for ES. Was thinking what can I do for it, but not found an interesting application so far. Maybe will come up with something, so it will be Shaver 2. Would certainly add some noise mode there, maybe a Phaser and QChan like modes too.

Was thinking on those variable-channel engines too. Yes, it is just to difficult to fit into a generalized tracker design. One crude way would be just ignore extra channels in some modes, and add a large general purpose effect column on the side, so each engine will pick only values it needs to from there.

Like,

C-1 123 C-2 123 --- ... ---... ABCDEFG

Four chanenls first, some may be not used in some modes, and values of the ABCDEFG block get interpreted depending on currently active engine. Internally they may be compiled into different structures, or maybe just change a small array of parameter bytes, and each engine will interpret some of the bytes in its own way.

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  • Shiru
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Re: New engine: Ear Shaver

Was messing around with this engine recently, and has found a really good use for the W in the ES mode indeed. I hooked it up to the phase control. When the W column is empty, the phase is free running, so it sounds just like it was (full backwards compatibility). The values of 1..8 now set a specific phase for the channel at start of a note, and not only it helps to separate sequences of the same notes, which previously were sounding like one continuous note (this was a problem I was intending to solve), but also gives a fine control over the timbre of an interval that is varies pretty well.

The updated version is attached, will be included into the future releases.

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earshaver.1te 11.83 kb, 4 downloads since 2022-03-21 

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  • utz
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Re: New engine: Ear Shaver

Great find! Yeah, phase control is definitely a very powerful tool in the 1-bit world. I still got this idea in my head to use phase inversion/offset to make a sample player. Wasn't too successful I tried the last time, though. There are two problems, first of all beeper is too noisy for low volumes, and secondly volume control via phase offset is non-linear, which makes it tricky to use in a controlled manner.

Btw, did you ever pursue this idea of yours further?

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  • Shiru
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  • From: Russia, Moscow
  • Registered: 2015-07-01
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Re: New engine: Ear Shaver

No, I kinda forgot about that one. I do have a real hardware now (although it is Evo, not the original ZX), so maybe I'll give it another go - to make sure how it really sounds without the resampling/aliasing in emulators.

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