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Showing results for tags '2600 Music Development'.
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TWO MORE TUNES today. Also thought I'd show a little progression in the development of a tune. Here's the 2600-ization of the title screen song from Wizards & Warriors: 2puck.zip Tommy whipped that up for me a few weeks ago on a whim, I guess. Here's the first draft of that: That's just the notes. Here's the 2nd draft: 2puck.zip For this one, I made the lower notes (in the first measure, the 2nd, 4th, etc.) a little softer, I made the countermelody articulated, and I tweaked the articulation a bunch until the notes "rang" a little. After listening to the original (NES) I also cut one note out of the countermelody. If I was going to use this for anything I'd probably do more polishing, starting with slightly fading out the last measure. Aaaand: I also added another song to the "tunes" collection: I also redid some of the incidental code for that ROM: now the newest song is the song that plays by default (the trigger still will cycle through to the older songs) plus RESET no longer just restarts the binary - now it restarts the current song. I'm also trying to think of a good "music kernel" for this and similar binaries. Any ideas? The current one is a little chaotic.
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CODED A FEW MORE OF THE TUNES Tommy wrote: pesco_pacman_v8a.zip Cycle through them with the fire button. My favorite is the 4th. Thanks for listening!
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WHIPPED THIS UP LAST NIGHT; an original composed by Tommy for an aborted - temporarily? - project. pesco_pacman_v8b.zip Enjoy!
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WELL, WE'LL see if I'm really done. But last night I finished the Four-Play song: FourPlaySong20060828.bin Did: -tweaked some of the slide-y runs (made them louder and shortened one of them) -added some crescendos/decrescendos to the melody. Nothing real obvious, maybe too subtle, but I think it gives it a bit of shape. -drums tweaked. Didn't mess with the 2nd drum beat (I think), but very slightly changed some of the drum breaks and added just the hi-hat back in to the part near the end where only the melody was playing. Also, in response to batari's comment from a week ago or so, quieted the drums just a hair. Still To Do: -get Zach's input and refine accordingly I'm going to post this binary to the Four-Play thread. If I had time, I'd like to probably give it another day or two to just listen to it and play around with tweaking some things - but I don't think I have time. So I'll call this done unless Zach has any requests or unless I or someone else has a brilliant idea. All comments welcome! Especially brilliant ideas!
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SO, SO CLOSE. So close to being done with the Four-Play tune. Here's what I've got now: FourPlaySong20060827.bin Timed it for the first time just now and it clocks in at 2:20 - which is just about where I wanted it. Working off of the to-do list I posted last time: Did: -finished the drum breaks -wrote new beat to go with 2nd bassline -figured out ending, wrote it, coded it Still to do: -tweak some of the slide-y runs -add some crescendos/decrescendos to the melody -drum tweaking - I'm pretty happy with the drum breaks (mostly), I might still tweak the 2nd drum beat -get Zach's input and refine accordingly As to that last point - any comments/requests, Zach? Feel free to post them here or PM me, as you wish. Anybody else is welcome, as always, to chime in with any of their comments as well.
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NOW I'M GETTING SOMEWHERE! Last night, after a relatively early soccer game, put in some more time on the Four-Play tune - and finished the evening fairly satisfied with what I'd done, unlike last time. Latest: FourPlaySong20060824.bin Did: Reworked the main drum beat slightly; I think I'm pretty satisfied with it now. Added/refined some of the drum breaks; satisfied with all of them except for the last one. Also adjusted the volume of the 2nd bass-line, pretty happy with that now. Roughed out (in my head) how I'm going to end the song. I originally was going to repeat the last 4 bars and fade out but that would require either a) making somewhat notable modifications to the music driver (ugh) or b) using a ton of ROM for copies of the last four bars, each at a different volume. But (Rebecca and) I came up with something better. Still to do: -finish the drum breaks -tweak some of the slide-y runs -write new beat to go with the 2nd bassline -add some crescendos/decrescendos to the melody -figure out exactly how I'm going to end the song and then write that
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WORKED ON THE Four-Play tune again last night: FourPlaySong20060821.bin Made a little progress with parts of it and...ugh. Feel like I went mostly backwards. My current music driver allows the use of 4 tones (AUDCx values) for notes (an additional four are assigned to the percussion track). I'm mostly using just three: square, lead, and saw. I am using the bass tone a little bit and I thought I could cut that part out and reclaim that 4th tone for an additional percussion sound. Well, suffice to say that an hour later I decided that it wasn't going to work and had to change everything back to what it was originally. Did spruce up some of the drum parts and polished the other half of the bass line a little. Everything takes longer than I think it is going to. In other news, since Reindeer Rescue is the HSC game this week I played a few games last night - got to the fourth level, but couldn't pass it. Maybe tonight. Also did some more preliminary planning for my next 2600 project. I'm forcing myself to hold off on any actual coding until I finish the Four-Play tune - maybe that way I'll get it done on time. (And man, I'm getting sick of the display with these music binaries...time to change that up, too.)
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BEEN CHECKIN' OUT NES tunes a little. The title tracks for 8 Eyes and Adventure Island III are pretty good. Anyway, over the weekend made some progress - not as much as I'd hoped - on the Four-Play tune: FourPlaySong20060820.bin Changed: volume of some notes in bass line; also played with the drum track a little. Didn't really do enough to count as "progress" but there it is. New deadline is end of the month; you can all watch me panic as we get closer... EDIT: ...And in case you were wondering about the title to this post: _He___He_Man.mp3
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INCH BY INCH - I'm getting there! I've been crazy busy the last three weeks trying to, essentially, remodel my bathroom. But I did block out some time this past weekend to work on the Four-Play tune and, though computer issues almost thwarted me - well, that and a little thing called Super Street Fighter II - I did manage to write the rest of the tune. Now I just need to code it, write the drums, and polish it to a shine. First, here's what my labor over the weekend produced: And here's what an hour of time while eating my lunch today produced: FourPlaySong20060814.bin All coded in! Now I can start writing the drum part.
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WORKED ON THE Four-Play tune some more last night. The result: FourPlaySong20060712.bin Composed a few more measures here which I like pretty well, though I'll probably tweak them a bunch before I'm done. Also did some volume tweaking: I was planning to leave this for final polishing, but very high (and very low) notes are much quieter, with the same AUDVx value, than middle-range notes and it sounded bad enough that I couldn't put it off any longer. Notably, in the harmony section the higher voice is the lead line but it was being drowned by the lower voice. So I made some adjustments. The two sections I added last night also have some really high notes that were disappearing, so I bumped those up as well. ... In other news, I had planned to test the latest Metroid VIP binary with my KC last night but it turned out that I didn't have the latest binary at home, and it was too late and I was too tired to use my dial-up internet connection to download it from here. So I'll test that sometime soon. But...I did remember to bring home the latest Ladybug binary and, hoo boy, that just rocks my little world on real hardware! Had a fun few minutes playing that before heading to bed.
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OK, ENOUGH tomfoolery with Gilgamesh. I did a little more work on the "tune" last night. Well, to be more precise, since I last posted about the tune, I did some more work on paper laying out how the structure of the song and, last night, I started to impose that structure on the tune. Here are the froots of my labors: tune20060710.bin I didn't change the melody at all, I just added some drum breaks and some drums underneath the harmony part near the (current) end. Basically, it sounds...not so good. I hesitated posting this for just that reason but then I thought, ah what the heck. I made some progress, might as well post it. It sounds iffy because I added some of the structure to the song, but a lot of what I added are just placeholders; so it sounds very unfinished. Here, I'll try to partially reproduce the proposed structure of the song here: Intro (both voices) High voice Low voice Drum break (thinking) Both voices (frantic) Harmony (interlude-like) Drum break (thinking) High voice High voice (prematurely triumphant) Drum break (thinking) Both voices (frantic!) Drum break (thinking) Low voice (optimistic) Drum break (thinking) High voice (tentative) Low voice (triumphant!) End I suppose I'll reveal that this is aiming to be the title song for Fourplay (Four Play?) - the idea here is to represent, sort of, a game between red and blue with the song. Hopefully it will work.
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OVER THE WEEKEND I FINISHED entering all the notes for the Battle With Gilgamesh tune. All that's left is tweaking a few notes, adding percussion, and adding volume changes. Here's a MIDI of the original tune, so you can hear how close (or not) we got. You can hear that the 2600 version is a little too fast. But that's OK, I think, since then you don't have as much time to hear the odd out-of-tune note.
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DID A LITTLE WORK DURING my lunch break today on The Battle of Gilgamesh. Some of the notes are wildly out of tune but either a) they aren't that out of tune or b) it's so fast - in any case, it doesn't sound so bad to me. I'll attach the music also so you can see what I'm working from here. EDIT: I suppose a few notes on the music are in order. First, notice that there are 16th-note triplets in there. The version of my music driver I'm using doesn't allow for triplets, so they are translated into 32nd notes and the preceding 8th note is now an 8th+32nd. Also, I can't get 190 bpm, so it is at 225 bpm. I could put it at 150 bpm, but faster is probably better than slower. Tommy did helpfully put some of the less-commonly-used notes' voice+value markings right there in the music, though sometimes they are wrong. Coding in music when it has been arranged for the 2600 like this goes pretty fast. The hardest part is figuring out which parts, and how, to patternize.
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WAS TOO LAZY AND/OR distracted to get much work done on the tune mentioned below, but I did get a little done on another 2600 tune. This one is not for anything in particular, Tommy just asked me to code it about six months ago for fun and, while he was over Monday night, we coded the first four measures: It is a 2600-izing of a tune called The Battle of Gilgamesh or something similar, from Final Fantasy V (I think).
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A FEW WEEKS AGO I finally got off my rear and worked up a rough draft of some music I promised I'd write. I got the go-ahead for the concept and I thought I'd post it here - I don't think anyone has ever blogged or posted (in the forum) the development of music for the 2600, and I thought it'd be fun. Here's the rough draft: tune20060624.bin The concept I had was something "plinky," with two different voices: one high, one low. The drums are almost pure filler, and will probably bear only the smallest relationship to what they end up. So then last night Rebecca went to bed early so I settled in for a good long session working on this some more. But...instead I played Boulderdash (with Atari800Win) for over an hour. Good times, good times. I did end up doing a little work on the tune, but not as much as I probably should have. Newest version: tune20060628.bin Not much different here...modified the existing melody line a little and added one more 4 bar section. Also added some code to reset the binary when you hit RESET, which is nice since you can't restart a binary in z26 like you can in Stella, and Stella seems to lag like crazy when I run binaries that play music. Of course, now that I have my Krokodile Cart, I can always hear my tunes on the real deal.
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AFTER MAKING BIG plans earlier this year I've done a whole lot of nothing so far. Hmmm...strike that. Looking back through my blog, I've done more than I thought. Mostly I just haven't managed to produce a game. I was going to use this blog entry as a data dump for everything I've half-assed over the last couple of months - and don't worry, I still will use it for that purpose! - but I think I will change gears and use it as a sort of retrospective of the year so far. Maybe help me get focused. So, if you follow the link above (don't bother), you'll see that these were my plans for the year: 1. Write something for the Supercharger contest. 2. Write a standard cart 2600 game 3. Port Go Fish! to the A800 4. Write something for the minigame compo I've sort-of made progress on a few of those things. I started work on an SC RPG for the contest but ran out of enthusiasm and time. If Glenn extends the contest deadline, I might pick this up again. Here's what I've got so far: SCRPG20060317.bin Basically, I took Andrew Davie's Boulderdash kernel concept and tried to shoehorn it into the SC. I got bogged down trying to figure out how to do the text. My start-of-the year ideas for a 2600 cart were 1. a paddle-controlled, four-player horizontally scrolling shooter, 2. a port of Metroid to the 2600, and 3. something else that would use the paddles. I don't remember what. To lay everything on the table, I suppose I could also pick up my Arkanoid demo and finish that and I could finish the PONG demo. I've also been working on (pencil and paper) a Street Fighter II-esque fighter for the 2600 - which would have an insanely complicated kernel. Most likely, and tying in with #4, Squish 'Em will be the next game I finish. As for porting Go Fish! to the A800 - I'd still like to do that, but I will probably try to port it to the GBA (!) first. In other news, I've done some music with Tommy. I haven't heard anything so I'm assuming that it ended up being too late, but Tommy and I wrote a title-screen tune for RPS, which I will unveil here: RODTVTheSong20060529.bin I think it turned out pretty well. I also am planning on writing (with Tommy) a tune for another game; hopefully this one won't be too late. So...plans for the rest of the year? Tune for other game, Squish 'Em, more SC stuff, and other stuff as I am inspired.
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BASED ON SOME COMMENTS I have received, especially in response to Reindeer Rescue, I thought I'd attach some of the stuff I use to help with 2600 tunes. First off, gotta give big props to my brother. He created these worksheets and has helped with almost all of the 2600 music I've done. Except for Reindeer Rescue, curiously. Tommy made this worksheet for me; based on P Slocum's music guide and E Stolberg's music chart. I find this much easier to use, plus it really shows what you have to work with: Second, here is an example of what Tommy creates for me; that I then translate into code: --hope you don't mind me sharing these with the world, T. The music driver I have written allows for note length between 32nd notes and half notes, and all 32nd-note steps in between. Each note has a volume (0-15), can be articulated (or not), and can be any frequency of any of 4 (predefined, hard coded) distortions. Also, a hi-hat plus two other percussion sounds can be laid over the top, though I just today cut the rhythm tracks out of the Metroid tunes since they are so rarely used and I ran out of ROM space. The tonal data is laid out in byte pairs like this: .byte %LLLLVVVV, %ADDFFFFF Where: LLLL = note length, 00 = 32nd note, %1111 = half note VVVV = note volume (0 - 15, written directly to AUDVx) A = articulate note (1 = yes, 0 = no) DD = distortion lookup number (0 - 3; generally, 0 = distortion 4 (square), 1 = distortion 12 (lead), 2 = distortion 6 (bass), and 3 = distortion 1 (saw)) FFFFF = frequency (0 - 31, written directly to AUDFx) I terminate with $FF - seems unlikely that I'll ever want to play a half note at full volume
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SOME 2600 TUNES for your listening pleasure: Metroid tunes: mm.bin Cycle through them with the fire button: 1. Title (64 bpm) 2. Item Discovery 3. Spawn 4. Secret Corridor 5. Brinstar 6. Mother Brain 7. Title (56 bpm) 8. Title (75 bpm) The title is the most polished. EDIT: Here's the latest version; took out the percussion and added a bunch more songs: 1. Title (64 bpm) 2. Item Discovery 3. Spawn 4. Secret Corridor (polished a bit) 5. Brinstar 6. Mother Brain 7. Norfair 8. Tourian 9. Kraid (not complete) 10. - 16. same as 2-8 mm.bin
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I'VE BEEN PLAYING with 2600 music lately - I wrote a new music driver, which I'm pretty happy with (maybe more on that later); I've been trying to write something cool with it.Here's an unfinished 2nd effort; the imaginatively titled: Song B songb.bin It just loops through the final 8 measures forever, about a minute in. Thoughts?