rensoup

it's an honorable attempt! The 3rd channel seems to be buzzing, especially at the beginning. You seem to always use the same drums ? Also no PWM ??

Like I mentioned a few times, LZSS can probably be pushed to decode 4 channels at 800hz, that's only 16 updates per frame so a strict sync method may not be required. There would probably be very little time to do anything else anyway. At 400hz you'd have about half a frame left. I believe I might have already asked but is 400hz enough for interesting bass sound ?

Yes but we're still dealing with LZSS so far, so samples or softsynth would take the same space (and probably a lot too!) but perhaps a hybrid LZSS/ 1 softsynth channel could be interesting. Though that would be a decent amount of work for a single feature. Despite its name (Softsynth), I thought the software was purely a sample based soundtracker, the demo disk posted earlier has a bunch of songs which I guessed all used the same sample set. But if it's all generated on the fly, that's even cooler. One thing I forgot is that for volume mode only, AUDF would not be required and would compress very nicely.

Ah thanks for clarifying... I thought somehow you mixed both regular pokey sound and volume only sound... It does, maybe I could be inspired to look more into those cheap analog synths and the tech you use in Reharden, thanks!

Just to clarify, there's no need to install another desktop which would be based on QT ? You could run a QT app inside a GTK env and vice versa ? Is that common ? (Sorry to be a noob, googling seem to give al sorts of different and outdated answers)

It deserved its own thread,it's very cool... too bad he never released more updates...

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 ?

I guess a license wouldn't be required for a tracker though ? I've recently installed an xfce linux distro which is based on GTK, so I have this dumb question :what would happen if you used a QT app on it ? the main window seems to be drawn directly though... There's still that dilemna I mentioned in my first post: you can get the GUI/interface from another tracker but then you have to throw away the RMT sound engine and update that tracker to support Pokey, or you keep the RMT sound engine and need to rewrite an interface. I vaguely remember being told Deflemask wasn't very usable... I have no idea how true that is.

never, sounds pretty good! this one ? https://atariage.com/forums/topic/194436-interesting/?do=findComment&comment=2474496

I thought your recent tunes/remakes already used 16bit, but I guess it was all about the filters ? so for PWM you use the filters ? and the SID like sounds are made using PWM ? and PWM are still square waves ? Just curious!

jester/sanity elysium uncle tom/scoopex occ-san-geen

So I slightly tweaked the above version which will hopefully fix the 16bit tables, I have nothing to test so it's up to you @VinsCool 🙂 I planned a bigger change (individual AUDCTL settings per envelope) but it failed so I"m going to stick to what we've got even though it's inconsistent. The 1.79mhz mode isn't activated by default when switching to 16 bit but you can do it with the envelope AUDCTL of course. You can now select which frame to start from when doing the frequency reduction. 1.64 Apr 2021 -added a switch for frequency reduction start -custom note tables are now completely split from RMT 1.28 unpatched -added Vinscool's latest custom notetables (V22) Get it from the first post!

just regular TV speakers... I just tried with basic headphones and it's better actually!

alright I took a look... I thought it was a problem with 16bit tables but you aren't using them at all... yeah I guess you mentioned that earlier 😏 But you're using the filter all the time which is supposed to have to be set manually in the new custom code. I'm pretty sure we discussed having each audctl feature as separate table in the .erti file but you liked having all the audctl bits as a single value. Well, you're going to have to make up your mind because otherwise that 's going to cause a lot of headaches 🤪 So can you try setting the filter directly into the envelope audctl for Freeze.rmt ? I'm putting the new 1.64 version here because I don't know if it's the direction we should take, so give it a shot and let me know... RMT2LZSS164.zip

You mean this was already discussed 15 years ago ? Well I just joined the party 😏 The best that's realistically possible is 16 updates evenly spaced per frame (so 800hz). I don't really know what the theory is behind samples in general but from what I understand to play samples on the A8, you go into volume mode only and pokey outputs a single maximum amplitude value which gets modulated by the volume to produce the signal... Does that mean that samples are unsigned on the A8 ? If you were to use the frequency as well as the volume for sample playback, would that be of any use because Pokey outputs square waves only anyway ? very silly questions probably...

I kept waiting for it getting out of tune, or the drums killing everything else... It didn't happen nice 👍

I split the code so that RMT unpatched does its usual thing and RMT custom used custom tables in that predictable way you're mentioning but that broke your Freeze version 😕 It seems you're using custom AUDCTL from time to time and the regular RMT code at other times (where it checks for the filter,...) This is the code for custom tables, this is done for all 4 channel: if ((m_songRuntime.TrackLine[CH].Envelope.bUseAUDCTL) && ((m_songRuntime.AudCtl & AUDCTL_CH1CH2_LINK) != 0)) { int frqTable16Offset = tabbeganddistor[m_songRuntime.TrackLine[CH].Envelope.distortion] << 1; byte outNote = m_songRuntime.TrackLine[CH].OutNote; m_songRuntime.AudF[ChBaseIdx] = frqtabbasshi[frqTable16Offset + outNote + frqtabbassloOffset]; m_songRuntime.AudF[ChBaseIdx+1] = frqtabbasshi[frqTable16Offset + outNote]; } which means: (note is set from 8bit table initially) if the instrument envelope has AUDCTL set and the channel has 16bit mode set ->override note from the 16bit table assigned to the current distortion and set both AUDF So that's pretty simple... So that's what it does above except that it checks all 4 channels, it is unnecessary (should be like you said 2&4 or 1&3) but that way you have full control. In the code above It means that AUDCTL 16 bit mode should be set on channel 1 & 3 to work as expected because the 16bit note is set on the current channel (lo byte) and current channel+1 (hi byte) It seems that in the original RMT code, 16bit mode is set on channel 2 & 4 and the 16bit note is set on the previous channel (lo byte) and the current one (hi byte). Perhaps I should just mimick that ? basically 16bit mode is checked last so any 8 bit mode stuff is overriden... so that's good right ? 🤔 not sure what you mean... Mostly 🙂 I have no idea what I'm doing... but your tunes sound awesome so I'll just go with the flow 😃 But first we should fix the Freeze tune so that it works with the custom code only, to clear any misunderstanding... I'll be putting up a new version shortly!

hmm... that's pretty hazy... both channels have to be fixed together, to have the recommended voice stable at 16 bit. another way of saying that ?

I checked the code and hmm there's probably another glitch... if you select RMT upatched, it's all good. if you select RMT with Custom tables, the behaviour might change depending on whether you're using custom audctl (dist 6 16bit is the 6th table) or not (dist 6 16 bit is the first table), so the table has to be in 2 places... I think... Need to fix, but as long as you're using tables other than the 1st one you should be ok...

oh yeah there's that too but like Vinscool said, it can be worked around... I was thinking compression efficiency: every time the compression is restarted, the beginning (of the track/pattern in this case) doesn't compress as well obviously. Plus it may require to change LZSS to compress individual Pokey channels instead of having all of them merged together.

Ah yes, everybody wants pattern compression and I believe I mentioned its pros and cons in the RMT2LZSS thread... somewhere...

I'm thinking I should change the original RMT code to use the 6th 16bit table (instead of the 1st one) when using dist 6... so that everything is consistent... I'm always afraid to make changes though because I have no idea if they're right or not!

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 ?

That's a 4 channel soundtracker on the megadrive... not sure why they bothered given they had a decent soundchip... I guess they had plenty of free CPU time thanks to the graphics coprocessor...

Interesting WoW demo! It says it's from 1990 😮 which is quite impressive considering the first Atari -ST-soundtracker came out around 1989! I guess the samples are 4 bits and there's no software mixing... I thought it was regular Pokey playback at high frequency which would have been interesting. If it is regular sampling it's probably too CPU intensive to have anything on screen (even for a single channel playback)