The Ninja Warriors - Daddy Mulk (Atari POKEY+TIA Chiptune Cover)

[Fragmare]

Trying to get that 7800 sound hardware to sound beautiful

 

 

POKEY music module provided below

 

 

[SlidellMan]

Now, THIS is a cover!

[Fragmare]

Thanks! Glad you like it.

 

Oops, forgot to upload the .RMT. POKEY portion only of this tune attached below now.

DaddyMulk01c.zip

[CPUWIZ]

Did you use TIA tracker and RMT for this? It's fantastic.

[Fragmare]

Thanks! And, lol, I wish! I used RMT for the POKEY music. To my knowledge, though, and please please correct me if I'm wrong, there aren't any TIA trackers that support PCM samples. Most of these samples are ran through some WAV2Atari app I found to make a .BIN here and recorded one at a time through a 2600 emulator. I think I had some trouble with the intro roar and the crowd cheering sounds, so those are just downsampled to 4-bit, 3500hz via Sox.exe. I also found that the TIA is surprisingly clear in its sample playback! Anyway, once I had all the samples I needed, they were gruelingly sequenced in BY HAND, in Sound Forge, until it sounded like the timing was right.

 

Like I said, if you know of an easier way to get samples into a TIA tune, let me know! I had to download a bunch of Perl script run time stuff to even be able to get this Wav2Atari thing to work, and even then I was only able to run individual samples through it. I'm not really a programmer type other than some basic knowledge, so hand-coding an .A78 ROM isn't really option for me. I really just wish there was a proper A7800 tracker that supported the POKEY+TIA and was able to spit out .A78 ROM images. That would be ideal.

Edited November 3, 2017 by Fragmare

[SlidellMan]

Maybe you should cover Darius, Rastan Saga, Raimais, Cadash, Baraduke, Strider, or even Sunsoft's Batman?

[Fragmare]

Maybe you should cover Darius, Rastan Saga, Raimais, Cadash, Baraduke, Strider, or even Sunsoft's Batman?

 

You should check out the Atari 8-bit Covers playlist on my Youtube channel. There are several other Atari POKEY covers on there. More to come, too.

 

 

https://youtu.be/fbc9RYKNCXo

[Jinks]

 

So post #1 the video is pokey and tia sound??

[Fragmare]

So post #1 the video is pokey and tia sound??

 

Right. POKEY doing the instruments, TIA playing samples.

[+sgrddy]

That is really cool. I was just reading about that music tracker too.

[Jinks]

 

Right. POKEY doing the instruments, TIA playing samples.

Well...it sounds amazing!!

Thanks for sharing. There is no one else doing anything like this!

[Fragmare]

Well...it sounds amazing!!

Thanks for sharing. There is no one else doing anything like this!

 

Thanks! No problem at all. Working on Castlevania III - Beginning and After Burner II - Full Sountrack. Might get the TIA involved for the AB2 OST.

Edited November 7, 2017 by Fragmare

[Jinks]

How about simons quest CV2. I have no idea why but I love that game and music.. Probably cause we played it for days as a kid.. or blaster master!

[Fragmare]

How about simons quest CV2. I have no idea why but I love that game and music.. Probably cause we played it for days as a kid.. or blaster master!

 

Both excellent soundtracks, and definitely on the "to eventually cover" list.

 

Hmm... I wonder if I could do a poll on this forum (or possibly over on the 8-bit Computer section) for my next Atari 8-bit chiptune cover, like I did over at PCEFX (they chose Star Fox - Corneria to cover on the PC-Engine)...

[iesposta]

Why did I have to stumble on this awesomeness?

 

Very awesome because in reality that could be made into a cart for a 7800 which can have a Pokey in-cart and still use the built-in TIA. The Pokey and TIA sound sampling is something not thought or at least never done before. Chip tune music artists use computer chips to create sound, and then it is recorded and mixed like any regular music production.

Recently I have been thinking about "Pretty Eight Machine SE by Inverse Phase" where he covers the entire Nine Inch Nails Albums with different chiptunes. I searched for TIA Tracker and arrived here. Track 2 is Atarible Lie featuring of course: Pokey, there's a SID chip cover, an AY chip, etc. You can hear the album free from his website, buy a track or download the album, buy a real CD, but not what I would pay for : A file that would play Atarible Lie on my 800XL or XEGS !

 

Yes, I do much the same way you describe sampling sound. I found that Perl script buried in the Blogs years ago. My quick comparisons seem to show the Pearl script end up better than using sox, even though they're supposed to be doing the same thing.

 

Many demos with samples, but it very hard to find software to sample and pack 2 samples into each byte.

Back in my 800XL days I sampled favorite tunes. A magazine even had simple hardware project you could make and play sound through it into the joystick ports for the paddle hardware to read the sound.

Now it's best to take a good wav file, band-pass filter it at a percentage of the destination frequency rate. Kind of like how mp3's throw away sounds must humans can't hear.

The I change it to 8-bit depth, rate around 4,000, usually no higher, but lower if real hardware plays it back well. (CD's use 44,100). Low sounds can handle lower rates, high sounds need higher rates.

Then Normalize to make it as loud as possible, or even clip it louder. Playback always seem quieter than the normal game sounds.

 

I had been typing this reply for the last hour, and lost it. The top 2 paragraphs were all that came back.

[Fragmare]

Why did I have to stumble on this awesomeness?

 

Very awesome because in reality that could be made into a cart for a 7800 which can have a Pokey in-cart and still use the built-in TIA. The Pokey and TIA sound sampling is something not thought or at least never done before. Chip tune music artists use computer chips to create sound, and then it is recorded and mixed like any regular music production.

Recently I have been thinking about "Pretty Eight Machine SE by Inverse Phase" where he covers the entire Nine Inch Nails Albums with different chiptunes. I searched for TIA Tracker and arrived here. Track 2 is Atarible Lie featuring of course: Pokey, there's a SID chip cover, an AY chip, etc. You can hear the album free from his website, buy a track or download the album, buy a real CD, but not what I would pay for : A file that would play Atarible Lie on my 800XL or XEGS !

 

Yes, I do much the same way you describe sampling sound. I found that Perl script buried in the Blogs years ago. My quick comparisons seem to show the Pearl script end up better than using sox, even though they're supposed to be doing the same thing.

 

Many demos with samples, but it very hard to find software to sample and pack 2 samples into each byte.

Back in my 800XL days I sampled favorite tunes. A magazine even had simple hardware project you could make and play sound through it into the joystick ports for the paddle hardware to read the sound.

Now it's best to take a good wav file, band-pass filter it at a percentage of the destination frequency rate. Kind of like how mp3's throw away sounds must humans can't hear.

The I change it to 8-bit depth, rate around 4,000, usually no higher, but lower if real hardware plays it back well. (CD's use 44,100). Low sounds can handle lower rates, high sounds need higher rates.

Then Normalize to make it as loud as possible, or even clip it louder. Playback always seem quieter than the normal game sounds.

 

I had been typing this reply for the last hour, and lost it. The top 2 paragraphs were all that came back.

 

Glad you like it.

 

I think playing samples on TIA while gameplay is going on might be a little too much for the CPU, but a title screen would probably be ok, i think. Then again, if you went lo-res enough on the gameplay, the Ninja Warriors is the kind of game where you could really shave off a lot of scanlines at the top and bottom of the display, giving the programmer a lot of vblank time, so maybe if your sample rate was really low (1-4khz), i dunno. I'd say if you could attach the volume data to an existing IRQ timer of some sort (1.9khz?) it would help a lot too.

 

I have yet to find any really good, effective way to get samples in Atari chiptunes. Wav2Atari works ok to process the samples for authentic TIA playback on an emu/hardware, though i think it outputs 7khz no matter what. I still know of no way of doing POKEY samples, aside from programming an engine yourself... and I'm no programmer, unfortunately. Maybe one day, somebody will make a 7800 tracker that supports POKEY (mono or stereo) and TIA, with the ability to play samples of varied rates on both, and outputs .A78 ROM images...