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Rob Hubbard mentioning POKEY - out of tune ;)


Heaven/TQA

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Level42

 

sure... but that does not count as an excuse? TIA sound is bad on the 2600 weather 1977 or not... ;)

 

C64 has no ANTIC e.g. but games get compared to A8... even C64 is 1983/84 machine while Atari was already 5 years old? (so... iPhone 3GS vs 6...)

......which says enough about how much the ANTIC, GTIA and POKEY were ahead of their time.....

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Level42

 

sure... but that does not count as an excuse? TIA sound is bad on the 2600 weather 1977 or not... ;)

 

C64 has no ANTIC e.g. but games get compared to A8... even C64 is 1983/84 machine while Atari was already 5 years old? (so... iPhone 3GS vs 6...)

 

Both used older chips. It's better to compare public release dates of the actual systems, which were about 2.5 years apart (if not counting from the introduction of the GTIA).

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......which says enough about how much the ANTIC, GTIA and POKEY were ahead of their time.....

Of course. They have been such ahead of their time, just some itsybitsy little tiny nifty corrections had to be done, to have a Computer for the 90s. Not sure about the real cost, but the hardware dropped development cost to a half every year. Which means, if a chip cost 10 Dollars in 1978, the same chip would cost 31 cent in 1983. But, for chip sellers it had been better to build more circuits into a chip . Which means 4 times more circuits, still cheaper than in 1979.

 

But, they didn't manage to give POKEY just a better frequency divider and volume control.

They didn't manage to give GTIA real colored moving objects, neither a 80 column mode that really was essential in that days. Not to forget to make a real PAL machine.

So, while in 1979 they did something far ahead of the time, selling the same Hardware still in the 90s was a lame task.

 

You know what's really interesting?

When the Tramiels were at C when the C64 had been sold, the commercial told "C64 has the best sound". Years later, at Atari , when the 65XE was sold ... it had the best sound of all 8-bit ;)

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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 ;)

 

kWo5dnB.png

 

Amount of individual words i understood in your reply: 100%

Amount of what i understood by reading your reply: 0%

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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 ;)

 

Just don't do drugs kids......Lol...Snap frag...

post-13027-0-09378000-1518085048.jpg

Edited by Mclaneinc
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Of course. They have been such ahead of their time, just some itsybitsy little tiny nifty corrections had to be done, to have a Computer for the 90s. Not sure about the real cost, but the hardware dropped development cost to a half every year. Which means, if a chip cost 10 Dollars in 1978, the same chip would cost 31 cent in 1983. But, for chip sellers it had been better to build more circuits into a chip . Which means 4 times more circuits, still cheaper than in 1979.

 

But, they didn't manage to give POKEY just a better frequency divider and volume control.

They didn't manage to give GTIA real colored moving objects, neither a 80 column mode that really was essential in that days. Not to forget to make a real PAL machine.

So, while in 1979 they did something far ahead of the time, selling the same Hardware still in the 90s was a lame task.

 

You know what's really interesting?

When the Tramiels were at C when the C64 had been sold, the commercial told "C64 has the best sound". Years later, at Atari , when the 65XE was sold ... it had the best sound of all 8-bit ;)

 

 

 

It's called BUSINESS.

 

In 1985 there was something like the Atari ST. And the Amiga. And the Mac. The 8 bit machines were only still being produced for the lower end markets.

Why would they invest money in fixing minor things that people like you notice, but not "average Joe" ?

 

But there is something "deadly" about upgrading existing hardware platforms.....you need SOFTWARE support.

 

Look at what happened with our beloved A8: almost NONE of the games of before 1985 ever used more that 48K because software companies wanted to make sure they would run on the 800 too.

 

And the ST vs. the STE: the E had more colors, and especially MUCH better sound capabilities (man, I hate the original sound chip in the ST....I'll take POKEY over that Yamaha thing every day, out of tune or not) but software houses didn't want to support it (or barely) because they wanted to sell their games to the ENTIRE ST user base, not just the STE owners....

 

So, even IF Atari had improved on the graphics and sound chips.....would they have been supported ?

 

 

Further....I totally agree about your words on the insane fast development of technology in those years. In those regards, the C64 was a shitty poor product. They should have been able to do WAY better than what they came up with. Instead, they ended up with a "smacked together" machine, with only 2 things that were better than the A8: sprites and the SID (not my opinion though...I hate SID's muffled, "forced" sound, but the general tenure is that it is technically better).

 

They even used many other computers, including the A8, as an example but failed to TRUELY surpass it on many fronts.

Edited by Level42
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With the ST and larger storage with disk management, a simple detect could determine whether to use the extra stuff or not... and all would be fine... they just didn't bother..

 

Of course they could detect it. That's not the point. The point is they wanted to sell their software to all ST users not just the few STE users....

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Lets find real AMY / XEM and reverse eng. it! Or contact S&S people or people from Atari.Its time to end this SID debate.

 

And then what ?

 

There is zero software for it.

 

You could just as well get any modern day synth chip and add that to the A8 architecture. AMY was brilliant when it was just new, but is also old-tech by now.

Edited by Level42
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The only example I can think of a brand where two variants co-existed and software would adjust accordingly were some MSX1/MSX2 games, for instance cartridge games by Konami which utilized the improved graphics in the MSX2 but would run with simpler graphics on MSX1. I suppose if the POKEY and GTIA in the XE series had been vastly improved with software methods to detect which type of Atari it ran on, the same could be true about Atari games too without losing backwards compatibility, though it makes software development more complex with multiple branches of code within the same program.

Also I'll be the first to admit that a chip which is hard to master might seem inferior at first using a simple setup, but eventually turns out to be superior once people have found out all the tricks so in that respect the very same POKEY very well could've goon from "worse than SID" to "better than SID" in three years time. However it is based on that POKEY sounds by 1985-86 indeed had evolved to a new level compared to what it sounded like in 1982-83, something I tried to establish before but didn't see any feedback about.

 

The whole thread began from a statemnt by Rob Hubbard how he found the POKEY to be out of tune, which is what happens if you program it like they still did in 1983. All the other discussion how you can make it sound much better is nice, but if all those techniques still were unknown by the time he was active, it makes no difference to his statement. If however other musicians in America or Europe were publishing great sounding music already back then, he and others coming from other platforms would have something to compare his driver and sounds to. If so, his statement would be reduced to admitting that he didn't know how to make music that played in pitch, using nice LFOs etc and that others musicians back then knew the system better than he ever had the time or motivation to get into.

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Of course they could detect it. That's not the point. The point is they wanted to sell their software to all ST users not just the few STE users....

but they could still sell it to all the st users... that's the point, it would require a couple of tweaks no different than different video card(s) or sound card(s) and their versions sold on x86 or pc/xt/at.... they did it for those machines they could do it for ST as well..... heck they did such things for CP/M and old S-100 bus machines, although some time you had to select what you had from a list and then the appropriate disks were made or the install copied what you needed to fixed disk...

Edited by _The Doctor__
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Amount of what i understood by reading your reply: 0%

You know it already. Think about your Daddy Mulk project.

The Atari has 3 devices that can actually play sound.

 

The main device is POKEY. Able to produce "endless" variations of sound.

 

Not to tell that till today no tracker exists that supports 2 16 bit channels and a softsynth channel ...

 

 

Using the available hardware to get the best music out of it, means to have workarounds. Those "workarounds" were only useful , if they could be redone to get the same result. This time the emulation in RMT sounds even different to the emulation in Altirra. Altirra offers to have the mixing closer to the real thing, but it is not resembling the critical threshold that is simply given on the real thing.

 

Then, if doing some demonstration , like this one:

 

 

 

 

.... to show that musically depending pitch correctness is possible. The stuff ends by some different preference, not liking the sound, whatever.

Even if one gets provoking people, there comes nothing back , except the same unbalanced wheel.... that I want to "repair" ;) .... "Hey, look the wheel is turning"

 

To explain, that this 2 operator sound (used in the video) is working on 2 bits of volume on two channels, to prevent the channel mixing from heavy distortions, still volume "finetuning" is possible.

Also, the sound plays higher than the programmed pitch is set. This means the octave can be spread to 3 and even high sounds that play at the resolution of the lower notes. So everything is fine.

Changing the volume at the given hardware level, will make the voice sounding harsh, while the timing control between the filter voice and the ground voice can be adjusted to a very soft degree.

 

Sending such RMTs will also not help, because people don't understand, what's going on.

 

So somehow a coder had to do a tracker 1st, that is working 100% as POKEY . No timing shifts, no volume differences.

 

Then there is the preparation of timing per channel, to have reproducable waves and similar sounding orbits created by the polycounter. This cannot be done in standard VBI programming , and isn't always needed.

 

and so on.

Edited by emkay
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I don't think its fair to bash the Pokey chip in any shape or form, and trying compare it to a SID is daft, yes they produce sound but in different ways. I'm more than happy as to what I hear on the Atari, there's been some fantastic uses of the Pokey as there has with the Sid chip, all I hope is that a developer will try and take advantage of the machine, to really push it.

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I doubt a new tracker would be the holly grail... you know... if someone would do that... he would then focus on different feature set (maybe) and then someone would find things which again going into wrong direction on others... so there is no "one and only" tracker...

 

Sandor did the brilliant hardbass but how should someone use it esp. when tracker is running on Android? etc etc etc...

 

So I doubt waiting for the holly grail is the way to go...

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Nonono, this emulation is so good it actually stil DOES sound muffled and forced.....

 

 

 

Then again.....there are people capable of making POKEY sound muffled too.....

 

 

 

This is NOT what it is supposed to sound like !!! Bad recording.....sounds like a frequency cut-off.....high-frequency filter....whatever....it's wrong.

Edited by Level42
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