Basic sound effect program

[Kiwi]

I made a sound effect program to test out what control type, frequency, and volume sounds like. I'm doing what's similar what I did with the sound effect stuff in IntyBASIC. Use a pointer of data to feed into the sound registers once a frame. Once the sound finished, then 0 will be entered to mute the sounds.

Here's the source code: SoundPrg.asm

I'm still new to programming in assembly language for the Atari 2600 so my coding is probably messy and chaotic. At least there's a stable 262 lines. It's quite fun to figure out how to do load sprites on the scan line. I did use the other source code as reference on what I got wrong and correct it. I had to make the number smaller to fit 16 lines, I was going to make a page of 12 numbers, then flip to the second page since there was enough RAM for 8 more entries.

 

One of the goal is to test out the sound effects, and the copy the sound effect data from the screen to source code to run in my games.

I wanted to share this:SoundPrg.a (9).bin

Instruction:

The 2nd digit zeroes in the Control and Volume does not change, so it just for decoration(I didn't know if it was only 16 different or more when I made the kernel.). Frequency goes up to 1F. Control and Volume, changing the first slot will add all to the slot ahead.
It makes it easier to fill up the data that way instead of going each one and adding one.

There's 2 cursor position in frequency. The first highlighting the left digit, will change the following data ahead, like the volume/control column. The other highlighting the right digit only change that number(Will roll over from 1F to 0). There's 4 cursor x position because it 'AND' well with the CursorX so don't have to do comparison statement on that.

[Nukey Shay]

Synthcart lite?

 

BTW only the low nybble is relevant to both AUDVx and AUDCx registers...so you only need to display a single hex digit for those. That'll work well for the 4 x position thing.

Edited November 9, 2017 by Nukey Shay

[Kylearan]

For quick sound design, you could always use a TIATracker percussion instrument. The percussion editor lets you define all three register values per frame by easily dragging around with the mouse or entering them manually, with almost no practical length limit, and you can immediately hear what it sounds like by just pressing a key. This allows you to quickly experiment with very fast turnaround times.

 

Downside: It uses Stella's old sound emulation which is not perfect, but for initial experiments and a lot of normal cases, it should be good enough.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Downside: It uses Stella's old sound emulation which is not perfect, but for initial experiments and a lot of normal cases, it should be good enough.

We have been discussing this last night and this will change very soon. The new sound core is already implemented into Stellerator and the same core will be used by Stella.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

An alternative tool is FTSFX by Eckhard Stolberg. The interface takes a little time to get used too, but the tools is very flexible.

[Kiwi]

Synthcart lite?

 

BTW only the low nybble is relevant to both AUDVx and AUDCx registers...so you only need to display a single hex digit for those. That'll work well for the 4 x position thing.

I got rid of the zeros in the current version by writing 0 and bit 0 to keep the cycle the same to grpx. One thing I could do is store the C and V 4 nibbles into 1 byte.

An alternative tool is FTSFX by Eckhard Stolberg. The interface takes a little time to get used too, but the tools is very flexible.

It looks cool! It does need the Supercharger to use it since none of the cart mapping work. I did use makewav and tried to load it in Stella, no dice. The program have stuff in the beginning of the ROM that is being mapped out by the 128/256 bytes, so it won't work or boot. So the RAM it expected is in the middle of the ROM. It will probably work with the Harmony cart since it loads the bin to RAM, which I do need to get once the holiday season finishes.

[DirtyHairy]

Eckart Stolberg's ROM needs to be converted into SC format in order to work. I have hacked up and attached a working version that will run with Stella or Stellerator.

ftsfx_sc.bin

Edited November 10, 2017 by DirtyHairy