AY + Beeper

Hehe, well this is something new ! 
Very cool

Cheers guys Yes, Abrimaal's work actually renewed my interest in doing this.

introspec, so basically like a reverse Tim Follin player?

Utz, I'm impressed with your work.

I've done two modifications of Special FX engine.
In the first one I used the drum routine to play the AY basses as a third independent channel, but...
I wanted the music to be editable in Beepola, so the limit was 4 bass notes + AY mute.
I chose notes D, F, A and A# as the best synchronized and hard-wired them to drums 1-4.
Drum 5 is used as AY mute.

In the Beepola SFX editor you can use more drums, but only drums 1 to 5 are exported to asm music data.
You can use other notes, but the values of DRM patterns must be changed manually in a text editor
or if you want to use 4 different notes, simply change them in the asm for drums 1-4
The values in the DRM patterns are 129 - 132 for drums 1-4, 133 for AY mute, they are exported automatically.
The drums 6+ use higher values 134+
The test is the pattern 4. Notes E, F#, G, B are used as drums 6-9.

The original beeper drums may be added to the music, but carefully. When the AY note is changed, a drum is released.
That's why there are only beeper drums 1 and 3 arranged.
Separation of beeper drums and AY bass is possible, but it would require re-writing the engine, to store the data for drums and AY bass in separate columns or use bits of the tracker notation (if any bits are free).

The zip contains a Beepola tracker file, a ZX tape and assembly of the engine and music data.
The tape runs with USR 60000 (or RANDOMIZE USR 60000 on ZX48), This is only a short example to see that almost everything may be edited in Beepola.
Compile Beepola music as data only .asm, remove the ORG at the beginning and re-assembly with the DoomBass.

introspec, I meant because Follin player is Beeper + AY drums, and yours will be AY + Beeper drums

abrimaal, nice work, and thank you for sharing the sources (and welcome to the new 1-bit forum, btw). Indeed, it is always a problem to find a way to edit music for new drivers. That's why I'm now trying to create a C++ library for extracting data from XM files. Ideally, this would allow for very quick creation of XM converters, but at the moment it is still too inconsisten and instable to be used productively.

In case of doombass, perhaps FrankT could help unlock the extra drums? He's done quite a bit of patching in the Beepola code, so he might have an idea where the relevant parameter for the limit of drums is hidden. Frank, where are you man?

EDIT: Couldn't resist trying to implement the Buzzer effect. Voilà.

Hi abrimaal

welcome back to the forum

Love your hybrid and multi-engine / digital stuff. Also, great idea to use Beepola for the editor.

utz - wow, the buzzer effect sounds amazing over the Beeper

Working on speccy stuff? Blasphemy!

The problem is, drums > 5 can't be entered in Beepola iirc. I'd think that's a hard limit encoded with the engine somewhere, since with other engines Beepola quite happily accepts higher numbers. So, basically it just might be a question of finding that number and changing it. But yeah, chances to find it in the binary are probably not exactly great.