1 Topic by david.given (edited by david.given 2025-04-27 09:49:50)

  • Registered: 2025-04-27
  • Posts: 1

Topic: Tim Follin's Startip 2, ported, badly, to the PET 4032

I tried reverse engineering Tim Follin's Startip 2 music track and engine and porting it to the PET. It went... not great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_SmzoQJBsQ

The issue is that the playback engine has got extremely ad-hoc timing. Every bit of it takes as long as it takes with no attempt to synchronise timings anywhere. So, depending on how much work it's doing, the pitch will change slightly. Because my new engine is using a different architecture, all the timings are different, and it's all fundamentally untunable. I suspect Follin simply did everything by ear. I've found transcriptions of this track, and the same note in different contexts will be represented by a different value in the data. To make it work I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to retranscribe the music from scratch, and, well, then it's not the same engine any more, so I'm going to leave it here.

Anyway, I thought people might be interested to see this.

Source: https://gist.github.com/davidgiven/ca16 … bef4504526
.prg: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jRVbj3 … ?usp=drive

(I'd be interested to know what it sounds like on real hardware.)

  • utz
  • utz
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  • Registered: 2015-06-28
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Re: Tim Follin's Startip 2, ported, badly, to the PET 4032

Wow, considering all the caveats, this is actually a very convincing rendition. I suspect this is about as close as you can get without cheating by streaming the original pulse sequence or something. Thanks for sharing, and thanks for sharing the source!

david.given wrote:

I suspect Follin simply did everything by ear.

That is correct, and confirmed by the man himself, iirc.

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