• Registered: 2015-12-11
  • Posts: 18

Topic: Silly Question about Z80

I know that the Z80 is heavily occupied when it comes to playing 1-bit music and it practically can't do much else simultaneously, but as a kid I was always yellow-faced of envy, as I watched the C64 tape-loading games and was listening to some great musical scores from the infamous SID (aaaargh) during loading...
So, I guess it's my time to ask:
Would it be possible (at least in theory) for the humble plain 48k Speccy who has no dedicated soundchip, to reproduce any kind of music while loading data?
I don't know much about this loading procedure, but just I suppose that the Z80 might be not extremely overloaded (e.g. no animations, no scrolling, no complex calculations etc.) during loading from tape, so it may have a chance (???) to play some kind of music at the same time...?

Sorry for being so silly to ask such a thing, but please before answering with a simple big "NO", I'd like you to explain a little about what exactly the Z80 has to do for playing 1-bit music and how many (if any) of its resources are free while doing that....

  • Registered: 2015-06-29
  • Posts: 343

Re: Silly Question about Z80

Hi kokkiklhs

I think it would in theory be possible to play short beeps as the speccy is loading due to the fact there are short gaps in the loading process. I'm not sure if it is possible to turn off the actual loading noise itself on a 48K speccy though??

I remember seeing a demo where graphics are displayed during the loading process by atebit, it's here:

Demo while loading
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ01EDhL0VM


I found these too:

Screen$ music
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScKKkVtB2lc

Loading noise tune
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLWEy59lUhc

ZX Beeper Album: 1-bit Mechanistic
  • utz
  • utz
  • Administrator
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  • Registered: 2015-06-28
  • Posts: 1,007

Re: Silly Question about Z80

There's also this: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=30929
They even released an editor for this, can't find it right now though.

Generally speaking, loading on the ZX is costs quite a bit of CPU, since it all the timing has to be done software. So it's not an ideal candidate for combining with 1-bit music, though I don't think it's impossible. It's certainly far more complicated than updating some soundchip's registers once per frame though wink

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utz's Website

  • Registered: 2015-12-11
  • Posts: 18

Re: Silly Question about Z80

Yo, thank you both for the answers, I discovered some amazing stuff from the links you gave here, I had missed them and now I'm quite happy to see them for the first time...
Indeed the poor Speccy has still a lot of hidden virtues and it's up to the talented and inspired programmer to reveal them!
So I guess I should keep on hoping to see such an amazing thing some time, eh?
wink big_smile