This bug has bugged me for over a year now. And now I found it

A few years ago I started to play around with the Lynx sound engine. It sucks.

Anyway, I decided to find out if there is any decent sound available in that hardware and wrote a piece of code that produced every sound the Lynx is capable of producing. After that I started to remove duplicates and after around 20 hours of math on a modern PC it finally spit out a set of unique waveforms.

I found out that the Lynx can only produce 6185 different waveforms. But these waveforms can be produced by lots of different register settings.

Still too many to listen to manually. So I sorted these waveforms according to the number of bits in them. The shortest waveform has only 2 bits in it (a one and a zero). The longest waveform has 4095 bits in it.

For some reason it did not sound right on a real Lynx and I thought, well, perhaps there is a bug in the Lynx hardware. But now I found the bug - it was in my music driver. I fixed it in MegaPak and suddenly everything makes sense!

The latest Soundtool works like a dream. Now I have full control over the sound hardware and I can now change the Mozart Sonata to sound like it was played on a piano or a xylophone or anything else the Lynx can produce.

And the nice thing is that all my research in the sound area is now included in Soundtool so that you can easily find instrument sounds that go together to form some great music on the Lynx.

So what is so cool about this? Well, this technique uses almost no CPU power for playing the sound! So it works perfectly with games. And the music is packed to a very small space compared to other techniques. It is easy to include 2 minutes of polyphonic music in around 4kB of memory.

You will see how it works when MegaPak is out.

--

Karri

- This is a small step for a man, but a huge leap for the Atari Lynx background music