Sandor / HARD

Hi there, That's the reason I made HardBASS. To provide deep bass sound that only affects a single channel and the other 3 can still run in 64KHz mode. The downside is that you need to be a skilled demo coder to use it - and didn't get integrated into RMT. https://bitbucket.org/sandor-hard/workspace/repositories/ Demo song using RMT+HardBASS:

Very powerful duet in this song - for when you've got English implemented:

Very cool demo, huge thumbs up! Your tech sounds even better than the one in my favorite VIC-20 demo "Robotic Liberation". I hope to see Atari demos from various teams with your stuff in them, something like here:

The original is Bmx Kidz from the C64

Nice smooth DYCP, Congrats Karolj! (BTW, the rotating font one in Joyride was a C64 conversion, the PM DYCP was my own. Drew the wave by hand, so that that I always have enough PMs for it on each line - that's why it's not a proper sine wave)

I love the colors in this game!

This sounds fantastic! What's really good to hear is from 0:21, the interesting new kind of bass in 64kHz mode. New to me anyways :)

Wow!

Haha, no I'm just going through threads I find interesting sometimes enjoying other ppl's results BTW I always wanted to hack a HardBASS instrument into RMT, so if I wanted to spend time on that I'd surely check this thread out on how to hack RMT! ...but I don't think I'd have the time and dedication to do that TBH. So just enjoying what I see/hear in this topic as it's really nice.

Wow, that's a pretty complex sounding tune for a single Pokey! Keep going

Hi there, Thanks for your questions. Yes, the 4th channel is playing both HardBASS and RMT sounds (drums in this particular tune, but could be anything). The slight modification I did for the RMT playback code will switch HardBASS on/off on channel #4 depending on whether or not any RMT sound is playing on channel #4 and if any RMT instrument is playing on another channel that's using channel #4 as its filter. It's very simple and fully automatic. If you play the HardBASS track alone, you'll notice that I didn't even bother playing the shorter bass sounds at the correct lengths, they just play long notes as the modified RMT playback code will do the multiplexing anyways (e.g. muting my long bass notes when RMT drums/etc... are playing) Using samples are a fully valid way of doing bass/etc..., but if you played around with samplers and analog synths, you know they give you a very different experience and different possibilities. (I did a lot of SID coding during the HardSID project) HardBASS is a cheap analog synth, not a sampler. (like a poor man's SID bass track) (BTW you get those ring modulation sounding effects for free with HardBASS, comes from a freq limitation - turns into a feature) I hope this helps. I wish you a lot of luck and success with your efforts. I hope it plays out very nicely!

Oh wow, nice to see HCM getting some love Thank you!

I don't read this forum very often and it's great to see you checked out HardBASS recently. My 2 cents about quality vs usability if you don't mind which led to these results: It's a tool made for others to use, therefore it has to work in conjunction with modern demos and games It means it needs to work alognside very tight kernels (think HCM, RastaConverter, or sprite/color kernels in cutting edge games) Consequently, we can't assume IRQs can be running freely across the entire screen Meaning, we can't do variable freq updates - that'd be extremely hard and expensive to manage from tight kernels without IRQs Can't touch STimer either as it'd ruin timers/oscillators possibly used for complex sound effects or other mechanics in demos/games This brings us back to constant rate playback so that instructions to devs can be as simple as clear as possible (e.g. for HardBASS it's: update the sample register every 8 raster lines - once per char line) Can't occupy more than 1 channel out of the 4, including sound playback and timing (again for compatibility with any random production) Has to be able to share/multiplex its single "occupied" channel with any random tracker/sound engine (same, for maximized compatibility) I did my best to write up the design principles, summarized as "Getting the biggest bang for the buck" here, if you guys are interested: https://bitbucket.org/sandor-hard/reharden/src/master/HARDBASS.md Of course if the goal is to create a standalone demo with the best possible music, all these principles/limitations can be ignored.

Yes, and it had no video-in either. ..just RF. Farkas / HARD created a video-in on it for me so that I could see what I was doing

Thanks for mentioning Karolj. I had a listen to this just now and it sounds very nice! If I can give some advice here, to make this into a tool to be used in complex demos and games with screen kernels rather than a standalone demo on its own: Make sure you give an easy option to update the sound during tight screen kernels (no IRQ or DLI). HardBass doesn't dictate how you propagate the sound data into the POKEY and it's very important so that others can use the tool you made. If you can display a HCM or RastaConverter picture while this is playing, that's a very good indication that you have a usable tool on your hand.

I was curious how a Bruce Lee face looks like in HCM non-mix Mode E. (HCM file attached, 8208 bytes) Viewer sources: https://bitbucket.org/sandor-hard/hcm-viewer-example/ Note: I know nothing about NTSC compatibility, so consider it PAL only. br2opt.jpg.out.1562139587085.bmp br2opt.jpg.out.1562139587104.hcm

This topic goes way over my head, but it seems very exiting. Do you guys see any chance this work will reveal unexplored tricks that could be utilized in demos/games? I love tricks like stretching missiles (my jaw dropped seeing that one), shifting by half pixels, etc... For example I'm hoping someone will discover a trick to fool the PM DMA to shift/offset the read address (tied to VCOUNT normally if I'm not mistaken). If you wanted to describe the potentials you're currently seeing (for dummies like me) what would you say?

I'm not sure costs a lot of CPU time (didn't make calculations), but given that this approach here makes IRQs kick in at virtually random points in your screen, that'd be very challenging to juggle with.

Our SID players didn't have PW support for bass, but we did use 16bit bass in most emulations. The other similarity is that only 2x 8-bit channels were left for everything else in these tunes and 8-bit channels aren't enough for accurate lead frequencies. So that's why you hear similarities I presume. In any case PW support wasn't there in our demos.

This is very cool! The main disadvantage I think is that it requires 2 channels, so only 2 channels are left for anything else. (e.g. no RMT filtered lead sound is possible unless you're happy with just two voices in total) In any case, very impressive technique.

My Atari & me - I'm guessing 1991-1992 All our demos were made on this one (my parts) That's a monochrome Junost TV I worked on all those years, colored everything from memory (I guess we all knew our favorite color codes by heart back then). Only fine tuned colors on a color TV when the parts were completed.

LOL! It all sounds very good. BTW, is deploying/debugging via WUDSN possible in some fashion?

Wow, this case looks great! Since it's not a commercial product... Could it not have the Atari logo? It'd look even cooler in my opinion. BTW, how accurate is this machine? Can it run REHARDEN without any sound/gfx glitches? (it's got pretty tight timing) ...and does it have the non-linear audio mixing feature I know from Altirra? (that's how I tested HARDBASS outside of testing on real HW)

Sure, detuned for multiple reasons on multiple tunes. The SID has 3 channels that have the same capabilities. That's not the case with POKEY, so I tailored emulation to each tune manually depending on what could I afford to lose. My priority was always deep basses and high pitch white noises for great sounding drums and if I had to sacrifice something, that was main melody pitch accuracy, not these two. I never liked the typical metallic bass sound of the POKEY (if you hear one, that's my own tune made in Benji). So then you can do low pitch bass sound two ways. Either 15kHz or 16bit. Now, 15kHz kills your hi-hats and drums on all channels, they will sound blunt - contrary to the popular belief that all drums are "low sounds" and don't need high pitch. There were a few examples when I had to go 15kHz still, because of the characteristics of the actual tune, but I tried to avoid that. So, I tended to use up 2 channels for bass. Then you're left with deep bass sounds, punchy drums and clear hi-hats, but 8 bit melodies. That's the main reason for detuned SID melodies in these emulated pieces. There is a non-typical reason as well: Sometimes I was short of CPU time and had to drop Tamas' real-time pitch conversion. Then I came up with all sorts of approximate optimizations and lookups / etc... That gave the worse results, but saved huge amounts of CPU time. So this is the reason I created HardBass in the 64kHz mode - to preserve all possibilities without killing drums and hi-hats. No more 2-channel basses or forced 15kHz.

You keep surprising me! The ones you like were actually made by me. I never thought someone would like these better