How are you guys sequencing your music?

[hendersonn]

"There's more than one way to skin a cat" as they say; I saw one thread someone made on how they put together some tunes (although I can't for the life of me find it now This), but it was a little confusing to follow. I thought It would be as simple as loading it from a bank (like a bitmap for player graphics) or something along those lines. I quickly realized it wasn't that simple. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of documentation on this so I figured I'd just ask.

 

My initial thought would be something like this (pseudocode):

LDA Frequency1
STA AUDF0
DELAY

LDA Frequency2
STA AUDF0
LDA TONE1
STA AUDC0
DELAY

LDA Frequency3
STA AUDF0
DELAY

Been going round and round with this; wondering how you all got your music going.

Thanks for any input.

 

Edit: I'm writing it in assembly; I'm not using bB.

Edited January 15, 2016 by hendersonn

[Joe Musashi]

"There's more than one way to skin a cat" as they say;

Here's what I'm using.

 

This is just a small pattern player. A song is made of a list of patterns and each pattern is a table of AUDF/AUDC/AUDV values plus duration. The timer is decreased every time the play routine gets called (typically once per frame). When it reaches 0, the next note is played. There are no explicit instruments and/or ADSR curves.

 

It is important that init and play routines have to be called separately for each channel. This makes it possible to use only one channel, e.g., if the other one is used for sound effects (which is what I'm doing in D.K. VCS).

[+SpiceWare]

The title screen music in Medieval Mayhem was done by moderntimes99, it's druid chip from this topic. He used Paul Slocum's sequencer kit.

 

Hmm, his site's gone so the link from that topic doesn't work. Here's the MP3 from Wayback Machine:

http://www.hp42s.com/misc/2600stuff/druid_chip.mp3

[hendersonn]

I appreciate the input, thank you.

[Kylearan]

Right now I'm in the process of writing a new sound player and accompanying music tracker which both will be released as open source Easter this year.

 

The sound player supports ADSR envelopes for instruments, patterns of variable length (individually per channel), percussion instrument "overlaying" a melodic instrument (similar to auto-hihats in the Slocum player but with arbitrary percussion instrument envelopes), and more. The player is finished already.

 

The tracker supports a virtual combined "pure" instrument (AUDC 4 and 12 combined, which gets automatically split when exporting the track to .asm), visual "pitch guides" showing which notes are available and how much off they are, and uses Stella's sound emulation routines for output. Instrument and percussion editors are finished, and right now I'm doing the pattern editor/sequencer. Here's a screenshot of an early version of the instrument editor:

 

 

 

Contact me if you're interested in trying it out when a roughly working alpha version is finished, which will hopefully be around early March.

 

[Kylearan]

Just a quick update: The tracker is almost finished, and the thread with current updates and downloads can be found here.

[SeaGtGruff]

This looks and sounds very interesting! Is there an option to specify whether you're targeting an NTSC console or a PAL/SECAM console?

 

EDIT: Sorry if that was a dumb question, I didn't see the link until after I posted (too fast on the draw). I'll definitely be checking it out.

Edited March 11, 2016 by SeaGtGruff

[Kylearan]

This looks and sounds very interesting! Is there an option to specify whether you're targeting an NTSC console or a PAL/SECAM console?

 

The logic is already there, only the "options" tab where you can select this is not yet finished. I'll release a new version with a working info tab and .asm export this weekend, and will do the options tab next.