Sandor / HARD
-
Posts
72 -
Joined
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Blogs
Gallery
Events
Store
Posts posted by Sandor / HARD
-
-
Very powerful duet in this song - for when you've got English implemented:
-
1
-
-
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:
-
5
-
-
The original is Bmx Kidz from the C64
-
1
-
-
8 hours ago, Heaven/TQA said:
just a small intro we released at Silly venture 2022 SE...
Atari XL/XE 64kb PAL single POKEY...
that so called "Mega DYCP" Scroller was on my bucket list for ages when I first saw the PM DYCP and the rotating char one in Joyride by HARD.
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)
-
3
-
1
-
-
49 minutes ago, MrFish said:
For those who don't frequent the 8-bit programming forum, the following was found in the "Mad Pascal Games" thread.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Jaskula: @Mikeee76, of Wasteland & Angry Betty fame, has release a new game written in Mad Pascal.
It's a colorful platformer titled Betty's Issues.
I love the colors in this game!
-
13 hours ago, emkay said:
It is really recommended to find the correct tuning, before doing stuff like "phasing" .
This means to put the resulting waves to the correct frequency.
Then, when everything is stable, the FX should be added...
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 :)
-
17 hours ago, EnderDude said:
This is just a quick little project I finished in two days
Anyone can feel free to test it with different tuning tables. Upon hearing the original version, it seems to be intentionally detuned by about +0.5 semitone.
agentx ii.rmt 3.14 kB · 6 downloads agentxii.sap 3.86 kB · 1 download
Wow!
-
1
-
-
17 hours ago, _The Doctor__ said:
Had a feeling we'd see you here! ... pretty inspirational, are you playing with his work yet?
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.
-
3
-
-
11 hours ago, VinsCool said:
RMT Visual Player has now been updated, rmtplayr is now merged into both projects, seems to run perfectly fine still!
Now the only real problem is the notes tables, there are missing entries in the high pitched range, so it leaks into a different table as a result.
This is something that could easily be worked around by moving all the data in a different memory page, but not without making the rmtplayr incompatible with the tracker itself.
So that's a thing to be careful about still.
[EDIT] Lol, as soon as I posted this, I found a bug related to my timer code.
Turns out I forgot to properly set the value used by the frame counter to calculate correctly, so running this file in NTSC speed was too fast, because it updated once every 50 frames... Oops.Wow, that's a pretty complex sounding tune for a single Pokey! Keep going
-
1
-
1
-
-
12 hours ago, rensoup said:
Thanks for those explanations... The LZSS player which I'm using to replay RMT tunes has the same kind requirements, except for RC pictures which are a little too intensive. Right now it's limited to 200hz but should be able to reach 800hz (fixed updates).
Just wondering what you mean here ? The bass channel is the 4th one in Reharden, right ? does the 4th RMT channel play regular AUDF sound as well as the digi bass?
If I understand correctly, you're generating the bass samples on the fly. Wouldn't it have been easier to just use samples or would it have lowered the quality ?
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!
-
2
-
-
14 hours ago, tebe said:
new unit: HCM2 (Hard Color Map) by Sandor Teli (Reharden)
https://github.com/tebe6502/Mad-Pascal/tree/master/samples/graph/hcm
hcm_test3 (press key START to skip picture)
Oh wow, nice to see HCM getting some love
Thank you!
-
1
-
-
On 4/9/2021 at 11:35 PM, rensoup said:
I listened to Reharden a bit more carefully and the result does not seem that convincing given the amount of work that when into it...
I was talking to @Wrathchild about samples which aren't just volume mode based but also update the frequency so that it requires less updates per frame... I know very little about sound in general, so I was wondering if that's possible ? Perhaps only for some kinds of sounds ?
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.
-
3
-
2
-
On 7/15/2019 at 6:06 PM, pseudografx said:
Yay, Junost 402B, if I am not mistaken
I used to have that crappy TV with my Atari too. Incompatible with PAL so no sound with picture, and the screen did not have black. Just light gray and lighter gray.
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
-
1
-
-
On 7/8/2019 at 10:02 AM, Heaven/TQA said:
sounds good. yeah reminds me Hardbass.
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
-
2
-
-
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?
-
1 minute ago, emkay said:
Obviously. The PW support costs a lot CPU time, and always different, depending on the played frequency. Not useful for synchronized demo screens.
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.
-
44
-
-
Reharden works and sounds correct as far as I can tell. I had to buy new speakers for the bass though!
LOL!
It all sounds very good.
BTW, is deploying/debugging via WUDSN possible in some fashion?
-
1
-
-
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)
-
2
-
-
Ok. Let me be more precise... the SIDs played in former demos. cool emotion e.g. are well... sometimes detuned...
I was wonder how you made them? Used player and used a virtual sid2pokey table?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.
-
5
-
-
Well... not sure if music rocks... I love the loading music and joyride Digi intro... but Sandors SID player is not my cup of tea...
You keep surprising me! The ones you like were actually made by me. I never thought someone would like these better
Like us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
AtariAge on Instagram
Watch us on YouTube
Chat on Discord
RMT Challenges / Frustration - HELP!
in Atari 8-Bit Computers
Posted
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: