VinsCool

February 11

38 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:

where might the xex's be, I quite like this...my laptop probably doesn't do any of these justice.

should be this one I think!
This song was composed by Spring, not me, btw

I also planned to record it from hardware, this one runs at NTSC speed!

judas_betrayal_of_christ.xex

February 10

In the meantime here's some more stuff by Spring that deserve more attention!
There's always a way to get some impressive results from RMT itself

February 10

Alright, here we gooooo!
Welcome to Battle Squadron

Battle Squadron - Intro & Title (Atari PoKEY Cover, Recorded from Real Hardware)

Module and executable converted using RMT2LZSS attached to the post.
This one is a PAL 100hz tune.

I'll squeeze out a proper 50hz version out of it later, it's more than possible to make it still sound good

Battle Squadron Title 100hz FULL.xex Battle Squadron Title 100hz Final.rmt

February 10

I'm sorry, I simply don't understand what the problem is, really 😅
I personally liked the way I did my version, but I imagine there's always room for improvements

I'll post the finished version in this thread soon!

February 10

5 hours ago, rensoup said:

Your version sounds pretty cool even though it's nothing like the original... Nobody was ever sure if it was a sample!

https://codetapper.com/amiga/interviews/martin-pedersen/

Honestly I have no idea, I wasn't even able to tell what the speech was saying.
I just know it used a few channels at once on the Amiga to produce it, so I tried to do something sort of similar
Also thanks! Couldn't be identical but hopefully not too bad

February 10

5 hours ago, rensoup said:

I'll repeat myself for each new release: AWESOME WORK!

Now allow me to complain a little 😀

There's just one sound that doesn't fit, I've recorded it because my damn player doesn't have a clock (proportional fonts are costly)!

battlesound.mp3 54 kB · 5 downloads

Of course I'll still enjoy it very much even if nothing can be done about it!

I'm not sure what you mean, this is literally what happens in the original song
Either way, I polished the entire project further and finished it earlier today.

Currently rendering a video from actual audio I recorded from my PAL Atari 800xl
Skip to 1:30 for that part.

February 9

8 minutes ago, emkay said:

For now (next step) I'll try to get the "Welcome to Battle Squadron" speech simulation.

Oh man that part was so weird, I didn't know how to simulate it, so I threw in some modulation notes at random volumes to get approximately what it sounded like.
I couldn't even understand what the speech was saying, so now "Welcome to Battle Squadron" makes a lot more sense in the context, hahaha

February 9

I like this version, compared to the other 15khz edit, the lead is a lot more stable.
However I prefer the more unstable nature of the other one you did before. I don't know how to explain, it gives a certain humanised tone

If you could harmonise everything accordingly to the 15khz it would pretty good I think, the percussions really lost their power due to this.

Moving the lead to channel 2 and 4, then the bass to channel 1 and percussions to channel 3 would allow you to do quite a bit of modulation for nearly no sacrifice.
since it will be running at 15khz that means you can get some really good SID bass that way, and having percussions in channel 3 would allow you to use 1.79mhz for the noise on drums, that combined to the low tuning of 15khz would allow you to get really stomping kick drums and snare.
Even better you could use the channel 4 for additional harmony on the lead, and channel 3 between drums to modulate the bass and even harmonise it with lower bass for extra crunch

Edit: that channel mapping is actually almost exactly what I did, except I ran it at 64khz the entire time, but maybe 15khz could work well...

February 9

About done with this one now!
I just need to polish it a bit and search for any errors I could have missed.
So I think tomorrow this one will be ready for release.
This one took me lot of work, seriously!

Battle Squadron 2x V53 RC.xex

February 8

3 hours ago, rensoup said:

Nice! Seems perhaps there are a few hiccups with the some of the new patterns but WIP I know!

Thank you! I know too well 😬

It's surprisingly difficult to get working without sounding like dying cats.

3 hours ago, rensoup said:

What's not soo good is that you seem to have defeated LZSS compression 🤪... at 27KB, you must have done some serious manual editing! It's also twice longer of course...

I noticed version 45 was also much bigger than your initial version even though both had the same duration... Hopefully the final iteration will still fit in 64KB!

Yeah I also noticed the massive output... I have indeed done quite a bit of manual edition, and used a pretty large amount of instruments, but many patterns were recycled, plus I have not yet cleaned it up and optimised either, so I hope there will be some space saved when it's done.

Relatively speaking I only have roughly 8 more pattern phrases to do, which like half of the patterns used in these will be copied from earlier parts, so I don't think it will be considerably larger at this point.

Having 32kb maximum would be a goal, and theoretically reducing it to 50hz should make the binary half the size of that, which would pretty much match the size of my biggest tunes.

Table Manuscrite was a 50(60)hz tune and I think the final executable after conversion was just above 19kb, and was considerably more complex than this one, so we'll see!

I can say for sure it's pretty amazing that everything I seem to do sort of break something due to unintended methods

February 8

Nice to see this thread again

Worked a bit on the Battle Squadron cover again tonight, and damn I just finished transcribing another section that seriously made me curse every possible words I knew.
However, I am pretty happy of the result now! It's almost finished now, I need to transcribe a few more patterns, and thankfully it's mostly a recycle job since they will use many patterns I already have done.

The RMT2LZSS conversion was once again flawless, still runs at 100hz, and I also confirm this executable works perfectly on real hardware in its current form!
So if everything goes well I should be able finish it by tomorrow, unless something else eats my free time away, hahaha

Battle Squadron 2x V49.xex

February 5

3 hours ago, _The Doctor__ said:

I knew it! The cat has been programming the Atari for you! I bet the kitty tunes your' ditties too!

Of course! The kitty was behind all that stuff since the beginning!
How else would I make "cat walking on a piano" tunes, or "dying cats screams" melodies otherwise

February 5

So while I was doing some other stuff, my AVGCART arrived earlier today (thx again tmp for this great product!)

And so I went ahead and tried a bunch of tunes myself and @Spring have done over the last 2 years.

Here's some hardware recordings from an NTSC Atari 800xl :3c https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1DR9NiLmvA7BjhIIz8N4vHIeDQ8-motgS?usp=sharing

I'll try to get some PAL tunes as well later, since I also own a PAL 800xl

All the tunes I recorded were converted into executables using RMT2LZSS by rensoup, thanks again for this tool man!
Battle Squadron will have to pass the ultimate test when I actually finish it, hahaha

And with that in mind, love the Atari 8 bit! Good night everyone

February 3

3 hours ago, Probabilitydragon said:

A question regarding PE 1.1

- when I join channels one and three and am using the "pure tone" square waves $Ax at 1,79MHz, the output of the sound behaves very differently than I'm expecting.

When I do a basic routine with POKEing the AUDCTL to 80 (joining the channels and clocking channel 1 to 1,79MHz) and controlling the frequencies with the frequency bytes of channel 1 and 2, I get what I am expecting - I get 16 bit frequencies with one of the channels acting as the high byte / coarse control and the other one as low byte / fine tuning.

But, while using Pokey Explorer, something very different happens. I don't really understand what's going on, but certainly not just square waves at 16 bit frequency resolution. Am I getting something wrong?

You need join channel 1 and 2 or 3 and 4 and have one of them run at 1.79mhz to achieve 16 bit.

What you did was joining 1 and 3, which corresponds to high pass filter.

3 hours ago, Probabilitydragon said:

Another note, I don't know if this is a bug or a keyboard layout related issue -

when I press shift+6 (& on my keyboard), supposed to increase AUDC3 by $10, AUDF4 increases instead by $10.

when I press shift+7 (' on my keyboard), nothing happens

when I press shift+8 (@ on my keyboard), supposed to increase AUDC4 by $10, AUDC1 increases instead by $10. Pressing shift+2 also increases AUDC1 by $10.

Sounds like a keyboard mapping issue on your setup, it behaved like expected for me.

3 hours ago, Probabilitydragon said:

...lots of questions today, another question: what exactly is two-tone mode?

Okay this one is currently unknown stuff for me , but I believe it's related to SKCTL bits to enable it, generating tones for the cassette interface if I am not mistaken.

3 hours ago, ilmenit said:

Sorry for maybe a silly question but I don't have much experience with Pokey programming.

One question about the UI, I understand that some values in the UI are the Pokey registers. What is the one marked with question marks?

SKCTL I believe.

February 2

18 minutes ago, emkay said:

You mean to activate filter and put the wanted values on both channels directly?

Yep! It does a world of difference, even without LZSS conversion, it would be pretty solid.

19 minutes ago, emkay said:

Well, there are still problems, but now that it is cleared that the filter handling in the RMT runtime is buggy, the workaround is a logical path.

It actually seems to be pretty good in RMT itself, using the apokeysnd.dll plugin, it seems accurate enough to get a good idea of what it will sound like at export. I believe Altirra is pretty accurate, too.

I have not been able to make many tests on real hardware but as far as I know the manipulation is mostly correct on that as well, so that's good news to me

February 2

I currently own 2 Atari 800xl machines.

Both were incredible deals from Ebay sellers.

By pure luck, I even own both a PAL and NTSC machine, because the PAL seller assumed it was defective, so I managed to snag it for really cheap, and it turned to be in really good condition, and never disassembled as well!

The only downside is that I currently have no way to load any program on them, or even own any cartridges, so I feel a little limited, but it's just a matter of time, there is a AVGCART coming in the mail, hopefully Canada Post won't be in limbo forever

February 2

It is absolutely possible to do stable sounds, but it takes a bit of manual work in the instruments.

I am able to make very stable pulse width modulation using new tricks.

Tuning and volume can be manipulated on the fly as well, in a similar way.

February 2

8 hours ago, rensoup said:

Ah, I'm way too lazy to fix this unless someone knows exactly what audctl modes to look for 😏

Yeah don't worry about it, hahaha.
It's just something worth pointing out, really. Using AUDF values does work perfectly fine under normal means, however, certain combinations could make it look considerably off compared to the sound we hear due to that.
Realistically I think most people won't even care about it, or most tunes wouldn't even do anything weird, I suppose

8 hours ago, rensoup said:

That's how MadMax, the ST musician started... I think he only published classic C64 covers for a bunch of years before releasing original tunes but in the end he turned out to be the ST's most iconic musician.

I love his work a lot! A great inspiration as a composer and arranger, soundtracks like Amberstar are in my favourite list.

8 hours ago, rensoup said:

Your BS cover is a lot better than kjmann's already nice version👍

Thank you very much!
Unlike the updated version of Actraiser, I didn't actually use his module as a starting point, but made my own new transcription.
I hope I won't leave too many errors behind, or ruin it with too much artistic freedom.
It really was necessary to do it entirely from scratch to be able to get things to work at all, anyway

I'll attach below what I have done currently. As you can see it's still incomplete, but will come together soon.

Battle Squadron 2x V45.obx

February 2

5 minutes ago, rensoup said:

Nice sounds!

Now, where's Battle Squadron final 😃 ?

Keep pushing, it'll break in RMT before it breaks RMT2LZSS 😀

Thank you!

Battle Squadron is coming soon, I am almost done with it, I just need to get a couple lead patterns transcribed, and touch up the entire project file, but overall the song is almost finished, and I hope it gives justice to the original compared to the older cover version

As for pushing, absolutely I will continue, this has to be the most fun part, hahaha.

I haven't been able to break RMT either, it's a surprisingly robust music program, honestly.

I think the only thing that was a bit off from the conversion is the VU meter itself, because all the combinations used were very specific, for example channel 2 always used the frequency 02 while the channel 1 modulated itself to create these bass tones, so visually it always looked like channel 2 was outputting the highest frequency, same for channel 3 and 4 when I used the highpass filter, it started on the frequency 00 each time, to then pitch lower and lower in order to produce that surprisingly rich sound out of it.

With that being said, finishing Battle Squadron next is the plan, I think I got plenty of experimental songs started for another day, I really do hope I can bring the WIP I posted above to the next level, especially because original music was never my strongest force.

February 1

I had been doing quite a bit of experimental sounds lately

I don't really have a finished song (as of right now!) but here's something using very unusual combinations, this sure does some really interesting sounds!
This runs at 50hz, and uses barely any CPU.

I'm also glad to see RMT2LZSS had no problem at all processing it.
I couldn't break it, but I wonder what will happen in the future if I keep pushing the unintended things into it

I'll attach my current in progress version to the post.

A Permanent Temporary Solution V2.obx

January 29

I truly learned how to make music and also sound design on the Atari 8 bit specifically.

If I wasn't tinkering around its sound capabilities, I don't think I would have gone as far as I am today, which is not frankly impressive by itself considering I am much of a newcomer (only 2-3 years really) compared to most people here.

Also more recently learning some BASIC now that I own the real machine (2 of them due to some incredible Ebay luck!).

Pretty fun to use, albeit slow, but that surely kept me busy without any way to load programs on the machines currently.

January 22

1 hour ago, rensoup said:

I'm curious to hear if you ever do a 50hz version, your take on whether it was worth using 100hz or not

It is so far! 100hz basically let me run my instruments 2x as fast, so better drums, better melodic instruments, better effects, more precise PWM, that is a blessing to have. Faster means better

It can be done in 50hz without any doubt, I already have most of my sound design ready for that purpose. In fact my 100hz drums are just the 50/60hz ones with greater precision and polish to give a nice snap

It would simply requires manual edition, but the reduced output by RMT2LZSS already gives an idea of what it could be like, except it was skipping every other frame that were used to update the sound generation, so a lot less polished than what it could be.

1 hour ago, Stephen said:

I don't think emkay has hardware capable of doing anything > 50Hz

But that doesn't need any different hardware as far as I know. Pretty sure my stock 800xl would run it exactly the same... But I cannot confirm until I get a way to load my own code on it.

1 hour ago, ivop said:

I assume you can run the original game on an Amiga emulator? Perhaps you can mute certain channels to make it easier to determine the chords, bass, melody, etc...

I like the HiScore tune more

Seriously though, it sounds better IMHO.

Edit:

A much better recording of Battle Squadron Amiga OST:

The current song in question starts at 11:21.

The first few seconds remind me of The Prodigy.

Edit 2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svJvT6ruolA

The short similarity is at 0:31.

Yup that was exactly how it was achieved to figure out most of what I transcribed so far.

The voice at the song start was simulated using some Distortion C and High Pass Filter until it sounded good enough for me, the bassline used the same trick except it was combined to Distortion A in the main voice, the C bass was modulating it, so I simply went ahead and tried any frequency that gave a pleasant distortion sound, and thankfully it was also in tune to the bass so that was a win for me!

I did my best to simulate the harmony in the bass by using the same filter trick at a lower volume, listening to only channel 1 and 3 with the percussions and arpeggio chords may show how complex I actually tried to make it work

The main melodic voice was simple enough, I used high pass filter on channel 2 and modulated the pulse width with channel 4, and used some variable volume levels to give thicker harmonisation in the sound, i might produce some chords or bassier distortion notes if needed later.

i've started taking notes for some tables for future reference, and also might have figured more tricks... But that will be tested another day. All I can say is that Pokey Explorer has been an incredibly useful tool for finding all this stuff, and I trusted my ear to mix and match the different combinations, haha.

i have to say most of these Amiga tunes are fantastic, and a lot of fun to transcribe on the Atari 8 bit, they let me explore experimental sounds really nicely.

January 21

2 hours ago, ivop said:

I really like how you utilized the pulse widths. Never an ear crinching duty cycle. It seems like you do the opposite of a lot SID composers. They start at 50/50 duty cycle, and then modulate to 20/80 or worse. That's when my misophonia kicks in You seem to modulate in the other direction, i.e. releasing the tension instead of increasing it. I like that

Thanks, I did my best to make the POKEY PWM sound very smooth, and also totally manipulated, not once it's doing unpredictable stuff
Adding some additional harmonisation at a lower volume gives a lovely resulting timbre as well.

1 hour ago, emkay said:

Sorry, but this time I have to dismiss the content.

I don't hear a "complete" tune in it. That start is totally odd. In the 1st edit at least the middle part reminds of Battle Squadron, and it's not bad .

the 50Hz version is ... "nothing" , with that weird start.

...Yeah? I am pretty sure I mentioned that I did not finish transcribing the song yet.
The 50hz version is not intended to be listened as is either, that was just to test out the reduction feature of RMT2LZSS, which does exactly what is expected in this case.

1 hour ago, emkay said:

Seems, I really have to put the tune here ...

Thanks. I am reassured this is indeed the song I was covering

1 hour ago, emkay said:

The point is that PAULA can play every frequency. The musician does some detune. And that is where POKEY can shine.

Use the detuning and produce the needed pitch by tickling the filter/PWM to the correct pitch for the tune.

Yes... that is indeed what I did as well, to get effects and harmony sound good. A bit of fine tuning goes a long way to make things that sounded weird to something smooth.
I especially like to use detune in a way that make things sound a bit less out of tune in certain parts too

1 hour ago, emkay said:

Is it really intended to sound like this?

Yes but actually no, this is the hacked up 50hz output missing everything the 100hz version did.

This is how it's supposed to sound like :

January 21

27 minutes ago, emkay said:

The 50Hz version doesn't play any "PWM" , only some basic fx.

I does... except it's broken since the instruments are read every other frame, so crucial parts are missed.

29 minutes ago, emkay said:

Also, the start of the 2x speed version, sounds like "2 tone" is used, not filter.

I don't know how to use 2 tone in RMT... That is still filter and different frequency combinations

Anyway I got a small update for tonight before I leave my computer.
Found a few mistakes but I corrected them in the bassline... I need to improve the transitions and also add missing parts later.

Did the same funny 50hz reduced version again for comparison's sake.
It's definitely very possible to do at 50hz too, it simply needs better instrument design, which can only be done manually... I might do a proper reduced version after I finish covering the song.

Battle Squadron 2x V33.obx Battle Squadron 2x V33 (50hz).obx

January 21

1 hour ago, Stephen said:

Wow - that sounds nice. Very low bass in this - I would not have expected "just" 100Hz playback.

Thanks! Well 100hz or not, if I am going to make a tune I'll try to make it sound good, hopefully
As for the bass, I figured out some new tricks involving the high pass filter and Distortion C to achieve it even in 64khz mode, so I wanted to make use of it as well!

Sign In

Profiles

Member Map

Forums

Blogs

Gallery

Calendar

Store

Posts posted by VinsCool