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Rob Hubbard mentioning POKEY - out of tune ;)


Heaven/TQA

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The conclusion ? Don't really know :)

 

As I wrote above... : It's an oxymoronic place. As soon as POKEY replays something like music, people don't like it.

Pitch correct isn't the relevant factor.

Slightly "off pitch" is needed to have a piano playing the music correctly. People who tried to adjust a Piano with some "Hz meter" , learned that 1st.

 

440Hz 432Hz ? what is the real basis of music?

 

The R-Type edit is great for a 4ch edit, btw. , it's just not what people expect, when listening to a POKEY tune. If a POKEY tune doesn't start with a 1st note that invades and crashes your eardrums, it's not a good POKEY?

And, please, don't play wider ranged melodic parts, it will be recognized weird ?

And, if the tune sounds like you break your bones as you're pitch poled like a dough on the table, if following a melody, is good?

 

Seems, people should rethink, what music really is.

POKEY can do MUCH more. It's just the missing software that makes development hard , and misunderstood terms of music drops any musically development.

 

A Tracker that help musicians to get fast first results by predefined settings, would be a nice start.

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Hehe...

When are you going to come hang out with us on the Atari Chip Music Discord server I made, man? :)

 

You might ramble on in broken English a bit (lol :P), but your understanding of the sound hardware is superb. Plus, you can share Atari tunes there, and bounce ideas off other Atari chiptune artists. Or, you know... you can just idle there, if you want. Haha

Edited by Fragmare
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I suppose the key question is if those techniques you describe to get the maximum out of the POKEY chip were known and in use by 1985-87 when Rob was somewhat active making 8-bit music. I know the SID techniques have improved as well, but the basic setup back in the days was enough for Rob to get desired sounds.

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I think the point is Rob could also have made greater inroads on such innovations, had he wanted to. It's all well and good. On it's face it's true as a default. but look at all those pokey chips being used out there today in all sorts of projects and all around tone, noise, and music generation. Handled with software techniques and sometimes supporting circuitry for clocking etc. It can put on one heck of a performance.

Edited by _The Doctor__
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Another question is who were pioneering POKEY music at the time, if the primarily SID musicians had anything to compare their works with. The same can be said for AY (and SN) based music as well. I understand that e.g. Tim Follin was one of the first AY musicians on the updated ZX Spectrum. While his music was great, I don't know if he pushed that chip beyond what others already got it to do.

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Another question is using 4x pokey - one for 2x16bit channels for better sound? So total 16bit/8channels. With future "QuadTracker" it will be SID killer. With 20mhz Rapidus can imagine producing unique sounds.. I am sure there will be quadropokey upgrades soon, it will be logical step after stereo upgrades...Also I hope someone will find AMY tape and make clone on FPGA than convert FPGA to ASIC...I think AMY can be atractive for Atari Fans, Synth Fans, Arduino Fans... Thats huge market.

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Certainly lot could be done with software. One of the problems with RMT is this.

 

In A mode (clean) you can choose any tuning. You can shift whole scale few Hz up or down. 8bits is enough for low octaves, problems only arise at higher frequencies.

But with bass modes, C and E, you can't fine tune. Those modes select specific frequencies from polynomial mode, which sound nice. Since some of the tones sounds shifted fifth, you can get 2 full scales from one polynomial mode. But you can't shift it up or down, the frequencies are fixed. For C has divisor $BF in C mode. If you change the divisor to $c0, it becomes F in E mode. The waveform of 2 neighbor values is completely different, because it selects different edges from the polynomial counter.

 

So back to RMT. RMT uses (AFAIK) official tone tables for each mode. Thing is it seems those tables tries to mach correct (A=440Hz) tuning. A mode is better for that. C and E modes kinda fail at that. Mode A may be (more or less) correct, but not compared to C and E. When working on Bad apple I tried to change the tone table for A to match how C is off. I actually used tuner application for smartphone and was tuning individual modes (16 bit mode too) to match each other. I'm still not satisfied, but I had to try at least. And at least on the tuner it looks better.

Edited by R0ger
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I am utterly annoyed by wiseguys here saying POKEY is rubbish.

 

People should use their brains and think about what year it was developed in.

 

The 400 and 800 were released in 1979.

 

Name me ONE device....it can be a game console, or a computer, or whatever.....that had a BETTER sound chip than the A8 at that time ?

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I am utterly annoyed by wiseguys here saying POKEY is rubbish.

 

People should use their brains and think about what year it was developed in.

 

The 400 and 800 were released in 1979.

 

Name me ONE device....it can be a game console, or a computer, or whatever.....that had a BETTER sound chip than the A8 at that time ?

 

Man I love POKEY. But mainly because it's such a challenge :-D Also I don't care about 'then' .. sure it was the hottest thing one day. And it can do some things better then AY or SID. Precise tone generation is not one of those though.

 

As for me using hardbass, I don't feel the urge. I feel the urge to make new tracker which will also allow for stuff like that. But that also puts it into 'distant future' ..

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Rob has composed a few new SID songs in the past few years, of which some are exclusive to his upcoming anthology. Perhaps the most constructive thing would be to point him to what a modern day musician is capable of doing with the POKEY chip, things that were more or less unheard of in the 80's. That is of course assuming he can be piqued to have a cursory interest in the topic, which I don't know if he would have. Though as a talented electronic composer, he might find it interesting or at least one would've tried to make him interested.

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So back to RMT. RMT uses (AFAIK) official tone tables for each mode. Thing is it seems those tables tries to mach correct (A=440Hz) tuning. A mode is better for that. C and E modes kinda fail at that. Mode A may be (more or less) correct, but not compared to C and E. When working on Bad apple I tried to change the tone table for A to match how C is off. I actually used tuner application for smartphone and was tuning individual modes (16 bit mode too) to match each other. I'm still not satisfied, but I had to try at least. And at least on the tuner it looks better.

And that's what I never get. People use generator C an octave too high, get worse pitch resolution and adjust the a generator to the faulty line. And then use 2 POKEY for a double of the eartrouble...

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As we know unlike SID, POKEY was never designed for music so we have to resort to software solutions. We can only have two 16-bit channels out of the box. For multi channel in-game music where CPU time is precious we can either compose music to avoid the higher range which 8-bit frequency tables are beyond accuracy or live with it.

 

I've had the opportunity to meet Rob a couple of times at various events over the years. Most recently in 2013 at Play Expo where he was attending to discuss the Bedrooms to Billions documentary with Ben Daglish and Max Hall. I was able to enter the event early that year and so had a long conversation with Rob about his Atari work and the recent scene. At the time I was working on Chimera so I mentioned that I'd disassembled his play routine for the conversion. He asked why I bothered when his Atari play routines from the time were based on his C64 player anyway. Before I had a proper chance to explain further he was called away by one of the organisers however. I don't expect he's overly keen on people messing with his work but he's always been polite and courteous when I've spoken to him.

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Rob has composed a few new SID songs in the past few years, of which some are exclusive to his upcoming anthology. Perhaps the most constructive thing would be to point him to what a modern day musician is capable of doing with the POKEY chip, things that were more or less unheard of in the 80's. That is of course assuming he can be piqued to have a cursory interest in the topic, which I don't know if he would have. Though as a talented electronic composer, he might find it interesting or at least one would've tried to make him interested.

 

 

I dare to say that Warhawk and International Karate and Jet Set Willy e.g. of Rob's Pokey tunes are not recreatable with RMT... we would be glad if he not composing in hex mon but using maybe RMT ;) and give a try.

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And that's what I never get. People use generator C an octave too high, get worse pitch resolution and adjust the a generator to the faulty line. And then use 2 POKEY for a double of the eartrouble...

 

Roger is first person imho who described the issue so I am able to understand the issue with RMT... and that explains now why Analmux patched the freq tables?

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As we know unlike SID, POKEY was never designed for music so we have to resort to software solutions. We can only have two 16-bit channels out of the box. For multi channel in-game music where CPU time is precious we can either compose music to avoid the higher range which 8-bit frequency tables are beyond accuracy or live with it.

 

I've had the opportunity to meet Rob a couple of times at various events over the years. Most recently in 2013 at Play Expo where he was attending to discuss the Bedrooms to Billions documentary with Ben Daglish and Max Hall. I was able to enter the event early that year and so had a long conversation with Rob about his Atari work and the recent scene. At the time I was working on Chimera so I mentioned that I'd disassembled his play routine for the conversion. He asked why I bothered when his Atari play routines from the time were based on his C64 player anyway. Before I had a proper chance to explain further he was called away by one of the organisers however. I don't expect he's overly keen on people messing with his work but he's always been polite and courteous when I've spoken to him.

 

 

Tezz I totally missed your Zeppelin compilation??? how the hell... ;)

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Roger is first person imho who described the issue so I am able to understand the issue with RMT... and that explains now why Analmux patched the freq tables?

The A generator is slightly wrong set in PAL . But that wasn't the main cause.

Using 16 bit basses with gen A needs real 16 bit values, as 16 bit sound does usually ;)

You know, Miker did an own patch for that.

What has always been wrong is the 1.79MHz clocking calculations.

Analmux did the patch 8 to fit to 15kHz base frequency and adjusted several generator pitch tables.

That's why the "best" music for now can be produced, using Patch 8.

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When are you going to come hang out with us on the Atari Chip Music Discord server I made, man? :)

 

You might ramble on in broken English a bit (lol :P), but your understanding of the sound hardware is superb. Plus, you can share Atari tunes there, and bounce ideas off other Atari chiptune artists. Or, you know... you can just idle there, if you want. Haha

You know, giving clues for doing something , must be authentically reproducible. This is not given yet. The result will always be ... let's name it ... unfavorable . It's hard enough to express in the forum already, to tell what's missing, to create the missing ;)

I also do that by "oh, just some spare time" . So, if somewhere in time, the missing software arrives, I'll take part there ;)

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