Classic99 Updates

[Tursi]

4 minutes ago, fabrice montupet said:

This background noise emulation is a good idea and really realistic, thank you! Do you plan to add a TV filter mode that has just the horizontal lines (so without the NTSC blurring colors). It would be great for the EU 99/4A users ?

Thanks! Matt was talking about how the vertical interrupt output interfered with sound generation, and while we talked about various noise sources in the console and the patterns I remembered hearing, I began to suspect that the major source was the keyboard column select. I think the results here agree with that theory.

 

There is clearly more than that for noise sources, I think all the TTL is noisy, but this covers most of what I spent so many years listening to.  

 

As for the PAL interference - I didn't even write the existing NTSC filter. I used my TI for the first 6 or 7 years on various black and white TV sets and I was not nostalgic for that at all... but the fellow who wrote the TV filter was offering up versions for all the retro emulators he could find. I had to admit it was pretty cool and even ran in black and white mode briefly...

 

.. or are you just asking for scanlines? I think I added those in so I could probably make that an option...

 

[fabrice montupet]

Yes, just scanlines displayed on this new filter (and if possible, the possibility to choose between even or odd lines)

[+mizapf]

(-:  ooO (And when I emulate floppy sounds, people go crazy and want to turn them off immediately)

[globeron]

1 minute ago, mizapf said:

(-:  ooO (And when I emulate floppy sounds, people go crazy and want to turn them off immediately)

Correct, have been playing today a lot with MAME and first I thought what do I hear, then realised it was floppy drive sound emulation.  I am okay with it now.

[fabrice montupet]

I like all the effects that try to give the illusion that I use the real computer, floppy sound is one of them  ?

[+dhe]

Do you want the drone of PBOX fan noise as well? ?

[globeron]

@Tursi  not too sure if I understand the change with the Joystick port configuration.

 

 

in the older version I was swapping between these options, but I cannot remember why I was doing that

probably for some games 

(something to do with my USB-controllers and configure Joy2Key and swapping between 1 and 2)

 

[fabrice montupet]

@dhe Not sure that I will activate a such option all the time because of its loud fan noise, but sure, I often will activate it for fun and to revive the old sensations. If I still use till today my real 99/4A hardware it is for nostalgia, so when I use emulators, all their features that will remind my real hardware is considered positive ?
In an upcoming future, all the hardware will die, only the emulators will survive. So, how the future generation of people will know what we have really lived using our real 99/4A hardware if the emulators hide some default of it?  Then, people are free to activate options or not.

 

Edited September 25, 2021 by fabrice montupet

[Keatah]

Good documentation goes a long way for explaining hidden features and exotic options.

[+OLD CS1]

6 hours ago, Tursi said:

Thanks! Matt was talking about how the vertical interrupt output interfered with sound generation, and while we talked about various noise sources in the console and the patterns I remembered hearing, I began to suspect that the major source was the keyboard column select. I think the results here agree with that theory.

Working from memory, the sound is damn near spot-on.  Even at the Munch Man title screen.  I think a little more subdued or muffled would be closer, but it definitely pulls at the memories.

 

2 hours ago, mizapf said:

(And when I emulate floppy sounds, people go crazy and want to turn them off immediately)

Floppy sounds are never accurate.  You cannot take the sound samples of one disk in one disk drive and apply it across the board.  The slip sound when a 3.5" drive starts up is always there, even though that sound is only heard when the spindle catch has to slide around the disk hub, which does not always have to happen and generally happens when the disk is first inserted, anyway.  Each step of the drive head has a different sound depending upon where it is in travel.  Not all disks have that annoying scratchy sound as they spin, which is always present in emulations.

 

Anyway, bottom line, the floppy sounds sound manufactured, generic, and exaggerated.  There is no soul to them.

[+mizapf]

2 hours ago, OLD CS1 said:

Floppy sounds are never accurate.  You cannot take the sound samples of one disk in one disk drive and apply it across the board.  The slip sound when a 3.5" drive starts up is always there, even though that sound is only heard when the spindle catch has to slide around the disk hub, which does not always have to happen and generally happens when the disk is first inserted, anyway.  Each step of the drive head has a different sound depending upon where it is in travel.  Not all disks have that annoying scratchy sound as they spin, which is always present in emulations.

 

Anyway, bottom line, the floppy sounds sound manufactured, generic, and exaggerated.  There is no soul to them.

 

Thank you for your feedback. This is a bit difficult for me to formulate without sounding like bragging. But honestly, for me the floppy sound emulation in MAME is one of the top things that I mastered to get going in the emulation, and I am particularly proud of that. I could not imagine how to significantly improve it. It's not that I could say, well, the sound is just as good as I was able to achieve it, sorry if it sounds a bit off; to my ears, it is in fact very close to the real device (while it is only one particular floppy drive, of course) and absolutely believable.

 

And it does a very useful job at the same time: You stay informed what your system is doing right now (unless you want to use floppies at unrealistic high speeds, but then you don't bother about sounds anyway). I'm already considering doing a similar sound emulation for the hard disks, but this is low priority.

 

I think that you are putting up some very strict requirements that may be overly hard or impossible to realize, maybe to disguise that you just don't like floppy sounds - like "If you can't do it 105% correctly, just leave it."

[RXB]

Floppy sounds on a Emulator are like Car FINS in the 1960's or RGB lights on my computer, a FAD that seems cool but mostly a waste of energy.

Some people love a FAD and go all in on it.

But like Bell Bottom Pants or insanely tall Platform Shoes will lose that cool factor very quickly.

There are people that still stick with a fad all their lives. I am not one of them.

[+OLD CS1]

45 minutes ago, mizapf said:

I think that you are putting up some very strict requirements that may be overly hard or impossible to realize, maybe to disguise that you just don't like floppy sounds - like "If you can't do it 105% correctly, just leave it."

Not to be misunderstood, I see the usefulness of the sounds even when not conforming to my nit-pickiness.  The sounds are not for me, but I will not begrudge those who like them nor the effort put into them.  Trust me, the cart was not placed before the horse here: rather than fill in reasoning for not liking the sounds, I had to articulate my reaction.  Ultimately, it is an option which I do not like and I do not use.  Not harm, no foul.

 

Also, to be perfectly fair, my dislike of floppy sounds stems primarily from Amiga and Atari ST emulator 3.5" drive sounds.  The heavier "thunking" noise of the 5.25" drives has a lot less variation, generally between drive brands and models, meaning I can take three different Teac FD55BR and they will sound almost identical in the same housing.

 

I have only heard in videos the sounds MESS makes for the TI floppies, so your efforts may indeed satisfy my critical cravings.  And if not, meh, just me being persnickety.  Consider me an edge case

[Tursi]

8 hours ago, mizapf said:

(-:  ooO (And when I emulate floppy sounds, people go crazy and want to turn them off immediately)

Oh, please, people love you. MAME is the "most accurate" and Classic99 is apparently just some third party knockoff that's easy to play Parsec on. No whining.

 

[Tursi]

12 hours ago, fabrice montupet said:

Yes, just scanlines displayed on this new filter (and if possible, the possibility to choose between even or odd lines)

Hm. I didn't think anyone liked the scanlines, since they don't draw correctly when the image is scaled.

 

I was not even sure I was going to copy the filters into v4, honestly.

 

(Edit: After review: difficult with the current code base. I'll keep it in mind though.)

Edited September 25, 2021 by Tursi

[Tursi]

8 hours ago, dhe said:

Do you want the drone of PBOX fan noise as well? ?

I have plenty of fan noise out of my PC, that's close enough

 

[Tursi]

8 hours ago, globeron said:

@Tursi  not too sure if I understand the change with the Joystick port configuration.

 

 

in the older version I was swapping between these options, but I cannot remember why I was doing that

probably for some games 

(something to do with my USB-controllers and configure Joy2Key and swapping between 1 and 2)

 

The older version was rather limited, using an older game controller API with hard coded assumptions for the "first two" joysticks, whatever your system decided that they were.

 

The newer system enumerations the game controllers on your machine and supports more modern controllers as well. You select the actual game controller you want in the drop down... and if nothing but keyboard is listed, then it can't see any game controllers attached.

 

Swapping is the same, just select which game controller you want...

 

 

I guess I need to update that screenshot in the manual

 

 

 

 

[Tursi]

5 hours ago, OLD CS1 said:

Working from memory, the sound is damn near spot-on.  Even at the Munch Man title screen.  I think a little more subdued or muffled would be closer, but it definitely pulls at the memories.

Thanks. I agree it is probably a little too loud... my first pass I couldn't hear it, then I made it louder and was surprised that it didn't drown out the audio.

 

The one place it's wrong from my own memory is when the system is not scanning the keyboard, it's a little too quiet. There's another circuit in there that makes noise while the CPU is grinding away. My money's on the multiplexer. But.. I don't think I will dig too much harder at this. It was just an experiment and it worked, so I decided to share it

 

 

[+OLD CS1]

1 hour ago, Tursi said:

I was not even sure I was going to copy the filters into v4, honestly.

I like the TV Mode.  It is a very good approximation of what to expect from a CRT.  I use it sometimes for play, but more generally for special screen shots.  I would love it even more with a black & white mode, as that is how I spent many years using my 4A as a youth, on my 12" B&W TV.

[+arcadeshopper]

Thanks. I agree it is probably a little too loud... my first pass I couldn't hear it, then I made it louder and was surprised that it didn't drown out the audio.
 
The one place it's wrong from my own memory is when the system is not scanning the keyboard, it's a little too quiet. There's another circuit in there that makes noise while the CPU is grinding away. My money's on the multiplexer. But.. I don't think I will dig too much harder at this. It was just an experiment and it worked, so I decided to share it [emoji6]
 
 

You can hear it well on real hw on my video

Sent from my LM-V600 using Tapatalk

[+Torrax]

I only had noise when using the wrong channel select.  Switching from "4" to "3" always fixed this for me.

 

I've never heard noises like shown in the video above.

[Tursi]

2 hours ago, OLD CS1 said:

I like the TV Mode.  It is a very good approximation of what to expect from a CRT.  I use it sometimes for play, but more generally for special screen shots.  I would love it even more with a black & white mode, as that is how I spent many years using my 4A as a youth, on my 12" B&W TV.

For that, just turn the saturation all the way down. It's a good representation of what I grew up with

 

[Tursi]

1 hour ago, Torrax said:

I only had noise when using the wrong channel select.  Switching from "4" to "3" always fixed this for me.

 

I've never heard noises like shown in the video above.

It was harder to hear on the TV, I think many of the sounds were above the bandwidth for RF audio. But I ran an external speaker as much as I could - even while still using a TV, and the sounds are very prominent right out of the port.

 

[Keatah]

BMOW's FloppyEmu, an SD card interface/emulator for real Apple II hardware has a standard generic electric relay that clicks to indicate floppy access. Sounds a bit different than a real drive. But then SD cards are a bit different from that 1978 hardware too.

 

 

[1980gamer]

12 hours ago, OLD CS1 said:

I like the TV Mode.  It is a very good approximation of what to expect from a CRT.  I use it sometimes for play, but more generally for special screen shots.  I would love it even more with a black & white mode, as that is how I spent many years using my 4A as a youth, on my 12" B&W TV.

LOL, me too.

 

I remember when I got a 13 inch color tv.  Maybe the biggest single upgrade in my computer history!

 

Wow, Parsec!  What a difference.

 

I guess next was going from tape to 1541 disk drive on the C64, followed by Adding Final Cart III for fast loading.

 

The steps got smaller...  8088 to 386 to 486/66 to pentium pro 100 to PII 233 to P4  etc.... At least that is my perception.  The reality I am sure it different.