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ivop

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Posts posted by ivop

  1. Posted · Edited by ivop

    I love the stable 16-bit dist C!

     

    Also, the linked 16-bit channels into one big 32-bit channel sounds great, too!

     

    Now, CTRL-ALT-1, 2, 3 and 4 (un)mute the first pokey channels in Altirra, but how do I (un)mute the second the pokey's channels? CTRL-ALT-5,6,7 and 8, does not work 😕

     

    Edit: The Kraid Hideout song is amazing. It even sounds good on the sub-par atari800 Pokey emulation :)  And it sounds so unlike regular Pokey. Possibly even better than the NES original, because it is way crispier :)

    • Like 1

  2. Posted · Edited by ivop

    16 minutes ago, rensoup said:

    I suppose the subwoofer is required to hear the difference though ?

    I just did a test with my sub-woofer completely turned down, and I still hear the difference. Not as profound as before, though. The kick drum starts to sound almost the same, and the shakers, hats, and snare drums lose some of their fidelity. But they are still snappier IMHO. And the missing instruments of the 50Hz version, were still present in the 100Hz version ;)

     

    And thanks. Now I have to find the sweet spot of my sub-woofer volume again ;)

    • Like 3

  4. Posted · Edited by ivop

    Top is the 100Hz RMT file.

    Bottom is reduced to 50Hz.

     

    100Hz-vs-100Hz-at-50Hz.thumb.jpg.63d4a9394bf0b1f198a9c4a27d9421c9.jpg

     

    I see at least four instruments completely missing.

     

    And if you cannot hear the difference in overall fidelity, that might indeed be your headphone or other equipment.

     

    Edit:

     

    Here's the shaker.

     

    100Hz-vs-100Hz-at-50Hz-shaker.jpg.13dbda78cb85396bb7275c79719e2230.jpg

     

    Notice how 1) the beginning/attack is omitted, and 2) the release envelope is gone at the end. That's why the ramp at the end starts higher at 50Hz, which does not sound good. At 50Hz, the shaker sounds like a hi-hat, and the hi-hat is silent.

    • Like 4

  7. Posted · Edited by ivop

    3 hours ago, rensoup said:

    yes that's how I understand it but even for drums I can't really tell the difference using headphones (not fancy ones though)... Have you got an example where you can clearly hear it ?

    I think this one does the job? ;) The nice thing about 2x speed is that you can more easily work around the 32-40 accumulated volume limit.

     

    100Hz-drum-test.rmt

     

     

    Edit: here are the .obx files of your latest converter:

     

    100Hz-drum-test.obx

     

    and down to 50Hz

     

    100Hz-drum-test-down-to-50Hz.obx

     

    The shuffle and hat sounds are mostly missing. And the kick and snare drum sound nothing like the 100Hz version.

     

    • Like 3

  8. Posted · Edited by ivop
    spelling

    10 minutes ago, pixelmischief said:

    No existing software will use it.  No new software will be developed that uses it, because not enough people will implement it.  Then there are the purists.  Will it still be an Atari?  What about artifacting?  It goes on and on.  I like the spirit of the initiative, but if the VBXE couldn't usher in a new standard for Atari 8-bit video, nothing will.  Simius got it right with the Sophia.  He focused on easing the path to modern displays.  Its DVI output can be connected to HDMI with a simple cable.  This idea for a Pi design is a solution that does with greater difficulty what another solution does better and more easily.

    Existing software that uses the E: handler will automatically use it. That would be my main goal for a cheap 80-column hardware solution. Sophia2 cost me €65,= including shipping with a group order. If I can get the same for $29 US and a Pi Zero, I'd choose that. And no need for expensive DVI to HDMI cables. Which reminds me, I still have to order such a cable ;)

    • Like 1

  9. Posted

    1 minute ago, rensoup said:

    One interesting feature about this release is the "replay frequency reduction" which simply discards pokey updates for tunes above 50hz... I find it very hard to hear a difference between a 200hz tune and its reduced 50hz version for every tune I tried.

    Makes me wonder if there's a problem with RMT or if it's just not worth it ?

    It seems that most 100+Hz tunes use the increased update rate mostly for drums, and not regular instruments. The drums are definitely better at a higher replay rate IMHO, but the rest is more or less the same at 50Hz.

    • Like 1

  10. Posted · Edited by ivop
    typo

    49 minutes ago, rensoup said:

    Agreed, I wondered if a spreadsheet could do the job at some point 😮

    In theory, it could. Export to CSV or something, and have a tool convert that to LZSS. Or VBScript 😮  Or whatever LibreOffice uses, and reimplement RMT2LZSS  ;) 

     

    But, I think it will be hard to beat simple ASCII text editor that can run binaries and shell scripts by the press of a single key (combination).

    • Like 1

  11. Posted · Edited by ivop

    10 minutes ago, pixelmischief said:

    Did we learn nothing from the VBXE?

    Perhaps not? ;) 

     

    But adding new modes is not that easy with this approach. Remember you are sampling the output of GTIA.

     

    A feature I could envision though, is a way to signal GTIA2PI2HDMI to interpret, for example, luma values totally different. Think creating a display list that is 201 lines of graphics 8 with background to black and foreground to white. The first line a a special line to tell the device to interpret the rest differently. The next 200 lines define a 80x50 screen of two byte characters. First byte is the character, second one are attributes/colors. That's 8000 bytes directly accessible screen memory for a very fast 80-column solution. Or 4000 bytes if you leave out the attribute bytes.

     

    • Like 1

  12. Posted · Edited by ivop

    24 minutes ago, foft said:

    Should be. Though GTIA colour sampling will be pushing the GPIO to its limits I expect.

    That's exactly what I was thinking. I have a Pi zero lying around for a while now, and this was one of the use cases I was thinking of. IIRC the colors are not a true phase shifted signal, but a PWM signal with varying duty cycle. Not sure if the Pi zero can do that, but various MCUs can have a timer triggered by a signal going up, stop the timer when it goes down, and interrupt the CPU. That could be very helpful to detect which color phase is expected.

     

    Edit: another option could be a 16-bit (or two 8-bit) shift register running at 16x color clock, shift in the bits coming from COLOR and present a 16-bit parallel word to the Pi zero.

     

     

    • Like 1

  13. Posted

    7 hours ago, Irgendwer said:

    QFT

    No intention to start blood flowing, but as we are talking about streams and not patterns here, IMHO it would make sense to create "Pokey-Sound-Fonts" and import them together with std-MIDI files into an converter to produce the streams. Real musicians are not tied to fixed tracker patterns...

    I think creating Pokey soundfonts is more work than creating a new editor :)

     

    But any editor could, in theory, could be your editor. I envision vi(m) (or emacs, leafpad, notepad++) editing a text file with a simple syntax, shortcut to run it though simplesyntax2LZSS and replay, etc... With the possibility to just check an instrument, check a single pattern, start at a specified pattern in the song, play whole song, etc...

    • Like 1

  15. Posted · Edited by ivop

    1 hour ago, mytek said:

    Thank you @ivop for posting the link to that once again. I really should add that to my 1088XEL webpage at some point. So can you say who is thinking of utilizing this?

    It's somebody that contacted me privately. I don't know who he or she is, so I choose to not say who it is, and leave that to the person in question once it results into an actual project :) I have no idea how serious this is.

     

    Quote

    Unless I am mistaken, @Dropcheck also created some schematics in the Eagle format. If so, it would be nice to have a link to that as well.

    I googled it, and lo and behold, it's in the same thread:

     

    https://atariage.com/forums/topic/271724-redrawing-the-1088xel-in-kicad/

     

    The second last post has @Dropcheck's Eagle version as an attachment :)

  16. Posted

    25 minutes ago, emkay said:

    It's also a part of the RMT player, to skip parts of the runtime, when CPU time is short. 

    6 minutes ago, emkay said:

    The RMT player always sets the filter offset one pitch off,

    Can you point me to the line(s) in the player source code where this happens?

     

    At least in the external player, this could be fixed. Perhaps even the Rmt.exe binary could be patched.

     

    • Like 1

  17. Posted · Edited by ivop

    21 hours ago, mytek said:

    Well first of all the U1MB as a replacement for the standard OS ROM and MMU is worth every penny in this application when you consider how it enables the rather simple IDE/CF interface hardware, adds 1MB of extended memory, can swap up to 4 OS and 4 language ROMs on the fly (8 if configured as XEGS), easy configuration changes, built-in RTC, built in SDX, need I go on?

    I suppose @Levas missed that the design was completely build around the U1MB at first.

     

    Perhaps the 576NUC+ is more up his alley.

     

    Quote

    Well I guess I did something right ;) .

    Sure :) Like I said before, one could easily create a board that takes standard MMU and ROMS. Edit: with the U1MB footprint and plug it in a 1088XEL. Edit2: Oh, I didn't see his build image yet. Seems like he already did that!

     

    Quote

    The schematic was translated into KiCad I believe - just need to do a search for that, and then have at it.

    https://github.com/ivop/1088xel-kicad

     

    I have been contacted privately by at least one person that is considering basing his new design on this KiCad conversion. Proves I have not wasted my time :)

     

     

    • Like 1

  18. Posted · Edited by ivop

    48 minutes ago, Gunstar said:

    Maybe a better answer is a spool somewhere in-between those two positions.

    I once printed this to improve my printer. I suppose this is inbetween :)

     

    IMG_20210111_214816.thumb.jpg.6bf610082854da5472620c5f87f59bf7.jpg

     

    The size of my printbed is pathetically small :D

     

    BTW this is was a Monoprice select clone. A lot of the printable upgrades (also see the fillament guide in semi-transparent blue PETG) are no longer available on thingiverse. I wonder why?

     

    Edit: it has been modded a lot. Only the motors and axis' are original :)

    • Like 1

  19. Posted

    4 minutes ago, Kaj de Vos said:

    Using just BYTE would conflict with using that as a variable name, so I think the ! distinction is a good convention.

    Regarding unsafe!!!, I agree that the exclamation marks help. But byte! ? A language always has reserved words that cannot be used as a variable name. But I guess it's just getting used to, similar to using ~ for hexadecimal :)

  22. Posted

    29 minutes ago, Dmitry said:

    In human languages, dialect differences are minor and easily overcome, but language barriers are major.

    That reminds me of a story I once heard. You can apparently draw a straight line from the coast of Belgium to Moscow, and on that line, everybody not more than 10km apart can understand eachother. From Stockholm to Rome or Madrid, that doesn't work, because of the Romance language barrier.

     

    44 minutes ago, Dmitry said:

    You might use latin characters, someone else cyrillic or sanscrit.

    I'm really glad that we mostly use Arabic Numerals around the world, and not, say, Roman Numerals. What have they done for us anyway?

     

    43 minutes ago, Dmitry said:

    In many ways it felt like Tcl and accomplished the same things.

    I loved Tcl/Tk back in the day! You could literally build your GUI interactively, like a Logo turtle with widgets :) 

  23. Posted · Edited by ivop

    6 hours ago, TGB1718 said:

    3. Again as I already said, it's almost meaningless to me. (maybe I'm stuck with the tried and tested languages :) ) 

    Yes, switching programming paradigm is intimidating at first, but, for example, some problems are easier to express in a functional language than in a procedural language. Learning a new, totally different language, really improves your thinking about problems. It even benefits your programming in your "old" language :)

    • Like 3

  24. Posted · Edited by ivop

    15 hours ago, MrFish said:

    So, it's inherently childish and/or laughable to question any practice that's been around for X number of years?

    Questioning, no, but calling them childish or laughable is uncalled for IMHO, hence the comment. And it's especially relevant the last, say, ten years.

     

    But let's get on with the topic of this thread ;)

     

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