Nothing special

[rensoup]

3 hours ago, ivop said:

It took six days with varying hours per day, and about 20-25 hours in total, including creating all the instruments.

ouch...

 

2 hours ago, ivop said:

Sorry, there's not yet a way, other than to type in all the notes, and patterns, and song data manually. That's what I did, and recognize the different instruments and those that start with a hat. You have to know how to read the register dump. Some knowledge about the SID chip's working is necessary. 81 is noise with gate bit, 41 or 21 is note with gate bit, i.e. the start of a new note.

So after doing that manual conversion do you think it's possible to automate it (at least the pattern data) ? 

[rensoup]

1 hour ago, emkay said:

Day has ended. So here it was is done

nice sounds (as usual!), in tune too but the tune itself is a little 🥱 (sorry to the author)

 

Can't have it all...

[emkay]

8 hours ago, rensoup said:

nice sounds (as usual!), in tune too but the tune itself is a little 🥱 (sorry to the author)

 

Can't have it all...

I liked the original for it's timbre at the start. Somehow sounding like a fresh breeze in the sunshine. 

It gets boring then. 

 

 

 

[TIX]

really excellent work guys  🤘

 

I always wondered how c64's Ghouls 'n' Ghosts music would translate to the 8bit..

Since we are looking for that kind of organ/ambient music for our "secret" upcoming game,

it would be interesting to hear your renditions !

 

..of course we need to save a channel for sfx

 

 

Edited December 7, 2020 by TIX

[zbyti]

12 hours ago, emkay said:

Day has ended. So here it was is done

 

 

 

some shortcomings but overall very interesting :]

[zbyti]

2 hours ago, emkay said:

It gets boring then. 

No for me 😜 

Edited December 7, 2020 by zbyti
typo

[ivop]

16 hours ago, rensoup said:

ouch...

 

So after doing that manual conversion do you think it's possible to automate it (at least the pattern data) ? 

It turns out to be a lot harder than I expected. One reason for doing this manual conversion was to get more familiar with siddump's output. There are a lot of problems to automate this.

 

1. Find out how many bytes frames to skip at the begining (0 for noisy pillars, but 4 for freeze).

2. Do a test dump and try to figure out the pattern length (96 for both, although XLent's transcription used only 64 because there were no triplets).

3. Dump with siddump -f4 -n6 -p16 -t117 Freeze.sid , which means skip 4 frames, one (16th) note is 6 frames, 16 notes per frame (1 bar), 117 seconds.

 

So far so good. Now you can clean up the start and end manually (exact pattern lines). After that I want write a script that cuts that file up in pieces of 96 lines. That are all the song lines. Then cut up all the 96 pieces in three files. While creating a new file, check if one similar has already been created. If so, symlink. If not, write to disk.

 

Afterwards, you end up with a bunch of files:

 

songline00_pat00, songline00_pat01, songline_00_pat02

songline01_pat03--->symlink to songline00

 

etc...

 

Now comes the hard part and that's extracting the right notes. Siddump puts non-notes between (), arpeggios for example, but fails to notice notes that have a percussive hi-hat in front. Best would be to check for each note that has the gate bit set, no matter whether siddump thinks it's a note or not. Arpeggios and glissandos must be done manually during instrument creation. Speaking of instruments, determining to which instrument a note belongs is not that easy, too. Perhaps compare the WF/ADSR/Pul columns between setting and clearing the gate bit?

 

Edited December 7, 2020 by ivop

[emkay]

8 hours ago, TIX said:

really excellent work guys  🤘

 

I always wondered how c64's Ghouls 'n' Ghosts music would translate to the 8bit..

Since we are looking for that kind of organ/ambient music for our "secret" upcoming game,

it would be interesting to hear your renditions !

 

..of course we need to save a channel for sfx

 

 

Tim Follin tunes do better without PWM. 

Here is a version that I started back in 2009. It needs the 16 bit ... but RMT ....

Here is what I got , sometimes it's like  a full stroke , sometimes .... 

 

 

 

[ivop]

13 minutes ago, emkay said:

Here is what I got , sometimes it's like  a full stroke , sometimes .... 

During the first 48 seconds, a full stroke did not occur

 

After that, it's not too bad. I like the break at 1:06!

 

1:20 and onwards, there's a bunch of patterns that need better "sound design".

 

1:46 it gets better again, 1:55 the band kicks in.

 

2:04 sounds pretty nice, although at 2:17 it's a bit out of tune

 

Rumble, rumble

 

2:43 wake up. From there on, it's a lot better, but hit or miss sometimes.

 

[emkay]

43 minutes ago, ivop said:

During the first 48 seconds, a full stroke did not occur

 

After that, it's not too bad. I like the break at 1:06!

 

1:20 and onwards, there's a bunch of patterns that need better "sound design".

 

1:46 it gets better again, 1:55 the band kicks in.

 

2:04 sounds pretty nice, although at 2:17 it's a bit out of tune

 

Rumble, rumble

 

2:43 wake up. From there on, it's a lot better, but hit or miss sometimes.

 

hmmm... let's check things

[EnderDude]

This will probably be the last version.
Listed are the changes made in version 4:

• Used distortion C instead of distortion E for the alternate "burping" instrument.
• Added vibrato to the lead instrument in the part from 0:42 to 0:57 and fake portamento to the bass in the part from 0:26 to 0:42 (using real portamento with distortion C just sounds like noise).

 

[zbyti]

I would give up those weird sounds (form 0:27), I know they are in the original but in my opinion they spoil your perfect cover.

[EnderDude]

Ah. I guess I can make a separate version more like the ZX version in that part.

[emkay]

4 minutes ago, EnderDude said:

Ah. I guess I can make a separate version more like the ZX version in that part.

would you share the patterns where that "drums" appear? incl. the relevant instruments. 

I'd like to try something. 

[EnderDude]

3 minutes ago, emkay said:

would you share the patterns where that "drums" appear? incl. the relevant instruments. 

I'd like to try something. 

Sure thing! Might as well share the whole thing at this point lol

Bionic_Stage_1.rmt

Edited December 7, 2020 by EnderDude

[emkay]

43 minutes ago, EnderDude said:

Sure thing! Might as well share the whole thing at this point lol

Bionic_Stage_1.rmt 4.79 kB · 4 downloads

OK. Sure the notes are correct with the drum?

 

Here is the proposal. 

Y

Bionic_Stage_1mk.rmt

[EnderDude]

21 minutes ago, emkay said:

OK. Sure the notes are correct with the drum?

 

Here is the proposal. 

Y

Bionic_Stage_1mk.rmt 4.91 kB · 1 download

Ah...now I get it.
I didn't get what you meant earlier.
I like how you somewhat combined both the spectrum and c64 version into one instrument.

[rensoup]

8 hours ago, ivop said:

It turns out to be a lot harder than I expected. One reason for doing this manual conversion was to get more familiar with siddump's output. There are a lot of problems to automate this.

😮

 

That's... impractical... I didn't realize siddump was the C64 equivalent of SAPR, just getting pattern length is a mess..

 

Why not just do a goattracker to rmt converter then ?

 

Not sure if you've seen the C64 debugger's tracker feature ?  

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oN1FMnTrv3M

 

 

 

[rensoup]

5 hours ago, emkay said:

Tim Follin tunes do better without PWM. 

Here is a version that I started back in 2009. It needs the 16 bit ... but RMT ....

Here is what I got , sometimes it's like  a full stroke , sometimes .... 

What about that really nice atmospheric part in the original (from 0:00 to 3:.. ) ? doable with Pokey ?

 

[ivop]

27 minutes ago, rensoup said:

😮

 

That's... impractical... I didn't realize siddump was the C64 equivalent of SAPR, just getting pattern length is a mess..

Yes, that's exactly what it is. A raw 50Hz register dump. And then try to reverse engineer that As proven, it can be done by hand, but automation is something else all together.

 

27 minutes ago, rensoup said:

Why not just do a goattracker to rmt converter then ?

Emkay and I have talked about that, but there are just not enough goattracker files available to justify the effort. Or can you point us to an archive of goattracker files?

 

27 minutes ago, rensoup said:

Not sure if you've seen the C64 debugger's tracker feature ?  

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oN1FMnTrv3M

Hadn't seen it yet. Looks nice! But the three colors on the keyboards are just the three SID channels. There's no detection of instruments or anything more sophisticated. But it's a nice visual effect!

[ivop]

29 minutes ago, rensoup said:

What about that really nice atmospheric part in the original (from 0:00 to 3:.. ) ? doable with Pokey ?

On YouTube DerpDerp3001 says:

Quote

Instruments and sounds he tries to emulate: Rain, Heavy Wind, Dripping, Detuned Triangle, Tuned Drum (I don't know which), Harpsichord, Woman Screaming, Bass Drum, Kalimba, Wolf Howling, Upright Bass, Low Triangle, Heavy Breathing, Heart Beat, Electric Bass, Unknown Plucked String #1, Penny Whistle, High Triangle, Metal Sheet, Unknown Plucked String #2, Flute, Harmonica, Bells, Vibraphone, Organ, Strings, Violin, Muffled Bass Drum, and Many Synths.

And a theremin

 

Didn't know this song. It entered my top-10 SID tuned immediately. The amount of different timbres is staggering.

[rensoup]

19 minutes ago, ivop said:

Emkay and I have talked about that, but there are just not enough goattracker files available to justify the effort. Or can you point us to an archive of goattracker files?

 

Not really... I thought goattracker was a really popular tracker with a huge library... but I guess .SID is the standard and it's pretty much .SAP 😕

 

21 minutes ago, ivop said:

Hadn't seen it yet. Looks nice! But the three colors on the keyboards are just the three SID channels. There's no detection of instruments or anything more sophisticated. But it's a nice visual effect!

You mean it's the graphical equivalent of siddump ? 😕😕

 

14 minutes ago, ivop said:

On YouTube DerpDerp3001 says:

Quote

Instruments and sounds he tries to emulate: Rain, Heavy Wind, Dripping, Detuned Triangle, Tuned Drum (I don't know which), Harpsichord, Woman Screaming, Bass Drum, Kalimba, Wolf Howling, Upright Bass, Low Triangle, Heavy Breathing, Heart Beat, Electric Bass, Unknown Plucked String #1, Penny Whistle, High Triangle, Metal Sheet, Unknown Plucked String #2, Flute, Harmonica, Bells, Vibraphone, Organ, Strings, Violin, Muffled Bass Drum, and Many Synths.

And a theremin

 

Oh... easier than I thought 🤪

[ivop]

15 hours ago, TIX said:

really excellent work guys  🤘

 

I always wondered how c64's Ghouls 'n' Ghosts music would translate to the 8bit..

Since we are looking for that kind of organ/ambient music for our "secret" upcoming game,

it would be interesting to hear your renditions !

So many forgotten SID sounds in that soundtrack! Sometimes it suddenly "opens up" and ascends the muffled/synth/filter sound that a lot of SID songs are known for. There's so much more possible with the SID chip. Three 16-bit channels....

 

Edit: Just listened to all the tracks/stages and it is like listening to a new 70's progrock album. Very nice!

 

Edited December 8, 2020 by ivop

[emkay]

7 hours ago, rensoup said:

What about that really nice atmospheric part in the original (from 0:00 to 3:.. ) ? doable with Pokey ?

 

If you have listened to my Monkey Island edit, your answer might be given. 

The additional generators must be in tune, if you don't want to set "1000" instruments for a pattern, to have the sounding right.

Particular generator 2 is a real melodic generator, but the notes get off, because the base is 1.79MHz. 

Similar with gen 4 (for a high note playable range) or even generato C is usable for a range of high notes. 

If the tracker allows to play them in any enveleope, it will give the played instruments the needed "face" without getting detuned.

A lot tunes would benefit to have a "chord / apeggio" channel, allowing the access to all generators. 

[ivop]

14 hours ago, rensoup said:

You mean it's the graphical equivalent of siddump ? 😕😕

Yes, exectly.