SillyVenture 1-bit Compo (Page 2 of 2)

Thanks! Well, at least it'll makes people on the SV aware of the GTIA capabilities, so maybe eventually they'll get more interested and it'll turn into a more popular compo. One issue, I believe, is lack of easy to use tools, the 1tracker support is quite clumsy at the moment - you need to manually re-edit data a bit, and assemble the engine with an external assembler. To be improved, of course.

Oh, actually you're reminded me one interesting topic. I recall someone already attempted it, but generally it is totally underexplored, I believe. The idea is to generate audio using the video output. Like, we often put colored strips to the screen when a beeper engine is working (because Spectrum shares border color selection with the sound output bit). These strips actually produce voltage changes in the video signal at audible frequencies. It is possible to display patterns on the screen that will produce certain tones, and by changing the patterns it is possible to play music.

Like this? https://github.com/luamfb/tempest-lcd
I also faintly recall nitro2k1 doing something along those lines on Gameboy.

I think the sound will always be noisy by the extra bursts of horizontal and vertical sync

but... about Port 0xfe

> he lowest three bits specify the border colour; a zero in bit 3 activates the MIC output, whilst a one in bit 4 activates the EAR output and the internal speaker. However, the EAR and MIC sockets are connected only by resistors, so activating one activates the other; the EAR is generally used for output as it produces a louder sound. The upper two bits are unused.

is it possible to make one channel louder by using a different bit combination?

The problem is that a) MIC output is on average VERY quiet compared to EAR (-0.3V vs -5V and b) MIC output differs wildly across Speccy board revisions (let alone across models). So it's not that useful by itself, but I want to try and use MIC for reverb one day.

Edit: I tried it on my 48k (board rev 4B iirc), it was barely audible.

I stumbled across it on HackerNews, so quite likely it either came from there or Hackaday.

Yesss!

To be honest I completely lost track of what is available on GTIA nowadays. Could you post a list of currently available engines?

Well, in the end I was too lazy again to make something Looks like I wasn't the only one, though.
To be honest I'm also somewhat demotivated by the lack of new engines (with the exception of TritoneFX, which is not so useful, sadly). I think if we want to put GTIA back on the map, we need some new, state-of-the-art GTIA engines. Preferably native Atari ones. Atari 8-bit is a more powerful machine than Spectrum, so in theory it should be possible to make a more powerful 1-bit engine for it, shouldn't it?