Chipper sound collection

[+karri]

I just started a new Lynx resourse: The Chipper sound collection.

 

The first instruments are from Flappy Bird testing.

 

Have a look at http://whitelynx.fi/sounds/

 

There is both screenshots of the instrument settings and a mp3 file with an example of the sound.

 

[Der Luchs]

There's a main prob, the instr. doesn't

support all notes and even not in every pitch.

So a instr. collection is totally useless beside percussive instr.

You only need to know in which key you want to write a song and what will be the highest and lowest pitch.

After that, you just start to make your instr. that fits in this key.

Thats the whole magic behind Chipper

[+karri]

Thanks for the insight.

 

I am aware that the length of waveform affects the pitch. So there is restrictions. But I intend to document sounds that work together. Or apart.

 

At least this is a starting point for me.

Edited May 29, 2017 by karri

[Der Luchs]

It's typical Atari
​Look at the A26er:


But you've got endless possibilities to create your sound

Edited May 29, 2017 by Der Luchs

[+karri]

Yep. The Lynx can only produce 6150 different unique square-wave sequences. The rest is envelopes and pitch.

 

My dream is to get a few decent sounds that would be easy to work with. I probably need about one octave. Don't care about the key.

 

On Sunday I really tried to get the riffs right in Johnny B Goode. I would like to re-write that tune for the credits screen. I did get a guitar sound that is 1000 times worse than a real guitar.

 

My son finally told me to give up and start composing with the sounds the chip can produce instead of trying to get it to sound like a real instrument. Wise guy...

[Heaven/TQA]

somehow the sound is the hardest part on Lynx?

[Der Luchs]

Not really

[+karri]

somehow the sound is the hardest part on Lynx?

 

The sound chips were created by these criterias:

 

The original design goals were that the circuits:

1. be cheap
2. require relatively little cpu help to make useful game noises
3. have sufficient range and accuracy for tolerable music
4. have 4 channels
5. have direct access to the DACs.
6. be cheap.

According to some sources (I forgot which) the price of the audio hw is 22 cents.

 

Being good for programmers is nowhere in the design goals. And it shows.

 

The most difficult thing is to fit everything in RAM. Sound comes 2nd.

[Turbo Laser Lynx]

My dream is to get a few decent sounds that would be easy to work with. I probably need about one octave. Don't care about the key.

 

I think this is a great approach as well, at least for starters and for people that are not that super into tweaking sounds.

 

 

My son finally told me to give up and start composing with the sounds the chip can produce instead of trying to get it to sound like a real instrument. Wise guy...

 

That's also a good approach!

 

Being good for programmers is nowhere in the design goals. And it shows.

 

Haha!

[Turbo Laser Lynx]

There's a main prob, the instr. doesn't

support all notes and even not in every pitch.

So a instr. collection is totally useless beside percussive instr.

You only need to know in which key you want to write a song and what will be the highest and lowest pitch.

After that, you just start to make your instr. that fits in this key.

Thats the whole magic behind Chipper

 

My newest demo-game is 99% done, I even got sfx and music side by side now, but I made a new tune and now two of the instruments and one of the sfx are out of pitch -_-;

 

I used some of the cool instruments included in chipper/slidebuilder so I wonder if there's some way of adjusting the instruments to match pitch? It doesn't sound too complicated knowing the key and highest/lowest pitch, but listening to a lot of Lynx games released back in the day, the music is often slightly out of tune, so I guess a lot of people didn't know how to use the sound chip and/or audio driver then either. I wonder if there's somewhere I can read about how to create these sounds/instruments in pitch (preferably in human language)? I read the audio chapter in the Lynx dev docs but was not able to take anything away from that.

 

Also I'm curious about what I can learn from the A26:er screenshot?

 

Any help greatly appriciated! : >

[+karri]

The shifter + feedback tabs control how many states the sound has before it repeats.

 

My understanding is that you need to choose sounds that have an equal length to keep them in tune related to each other.

 

You can also choose sounds where the length is a multiple of each other.

 

But choosing one instrument with a length of 5 and another with a length of 6 will always produce sounds out of tune.

 

Some of the sounds are also symmetrical (as many 0 bits ad 1 bits in the pattern) while other are not symmetrical (the sound drifts to either max or min if you choose the integration bit on).

 

Chipper has both tick boxes to choose the symmetrical waveforms and some indication of the length of the sound pattern.

[Turbo Laser Lynx]

Thanks man, this helps a lot. I will need to experiment a bit more.