Trying to make some PoKEY music!

[VinsCool]

3 hours ago, _The Doctor__ said:

I knew it! The cat has been programming the Atari for you! I bet the kitty tunes your' ditties too!  

Of course! The kitty was behind all that stuff since the beginning!
How else would I make "cat walking on a piano" tunes, or "dying cats screams" melodies otherwise  

[pseudografx]

Actually, he is the cat! It is obvious from the avatar.

Edited February 5, 2021 by pseudografx

[emkay]

Yeah... and as a Squirrel I really should take care

[VinsCool]

About done with this one now!
I just need to polish it a bit and search for any errors I could have missed.  
So I think tomorrow this one will be ready for release.
This one took me lot of work, seriously!

Battle Squadron 2x V53 RC.xex

Edited February 9, 2021 by VinsCool
I can't English >.<

[rensoup]

13 hours ago, VinsCool said:

This one took me lot of work, seriously!

I'll repeat myself for each new release: AWESOME WORK!

 

Now allow me to complain a little ?

 

There's just one sound that doesn't fit, I've recorded it because my damn player doesn't have a clock (proportional fonts are costly)!

 

battlesound.mp3

 

Of course I'll still enjoy it very much even if nothing can be done about it!

[VinsCool]

5 hours ago, rensoup said:

I'll repeat myself for each new release: AWESOME WORK!

 

Now allow me to complain a little ?

 

There's just one sound that doesn't fit, I've recorded it because my damn player doesn't have a clock (proportional fonts are costly)!

 

battlesound.mp3 54 kB · 5 downloads

 

Of course I'll still enjoy it very much even if nothing can be done about it!

I'm not sure what you mean, this is literally what happens in the original song  
Either way, I polished the entire project further and finished it earlier today.

Currently rendering a video from actual audio I recorded from my PAL Atari 800xl  
Skip to 1:30 for that part.
 

 

Edited February 10, 2021 by VinsCool

[emkay]

5 hours ago, rensoup said:

I'll repeat myself for each new release: AWESOME WORK!

 

Now allow me to complain a little ?

 

There's just one sound that doesn't fit, I've recorded it because my damn player doesn't have a clock (proportional fonts are costly)!

 

battlesound.mp3 54 kB · 6 downloads

 

Of course I'll still enjoy it very much even if nothing can be done about it!

LOL

 

That's exactly the point why I released the latest version of my edit.

 

@VinsCool

It really sounds like a "balloon" over the rest of the tune. It simply doesn't fit, the the great rest of your version. 

Using it an octave lower and get the higher frequency from a small PWM distance will solve this for sure. 

Edited February 10, 2021 by emkay

[VinsCool]

I'm sorry, I simply don't understand what the problem is, really ?
I personally liked the way I did my version, but I imagine there's always room for improvements  

I'll post the finished version in this thread soon!  

[VinsCool]

Alright, here we gooooo!
Welcome to Battle Squadron

Battle Squadron - Intro & Title (Atari PoKEY Cover, Recorded from Real Hardware)

 

 

Module and executable converted using RMT2LZSS attached to the post.
This one is a PAL 100hz tune.

I'll squeeze out a proper 50hz version out of it later, it's more than possible to make it still sound good  

Battle Squadron Title 100hz FULL.xex Battle Squadron Title 100hz Final.rmt

Edited February 10, 2021 by VinsCool

[Schnurrikowski]

3 hours ago, VinsCool said:

 

 

Now, THAT I call a nice rendition! You are a genius. Big thumbs up!

[rensoup]

16 hours ago, VinsCool said:

Alright, here we gooooo!
Welcome to Battle Squadron

Awesome!  Hopefully it'll get the views & likes it deserves!!

 

(c'mon people, like that post above!)

 

16 hours ago, VinsCool said:

I'll squeeze out a proper 50hz version out of it later, it's more than possible to make it still sound good  

What's reassuring is that the .rmt takes 14KB (probably some unused stuff) but that means a 50hz LZSS might still be in the same ball park...

 

Edited February 10, 2021 by rensoup

[VinsCool]

In the meantime here's some more stuff by Spring that deserve more attention!
There's always a way to get some impressive results from RMT itself  
 

 

[_The Doctor__]

15 minutes ago, VinsCool said:

In the meantime here's some more stuff by Spring that deserve more attention!
There's always a way to get some impressive results from RMT itself  
 

 

where might the xex's be, I quite like this...my laptop probably doesn't do any of these justice.

[VinsCool]

38 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:

where might the xex's be, I quite like this...my laptop probably doesn't do any of these justice.

should be this one I think!
This song was composed by Spring, not me, btw  

I also planned to record it from hardware, this one runs at NTSC speed!

judas_betrayal_of_christ.xex

Edited February 11, 2021 by VinsCool

[rensoup]

On 2/10/2021 at 5:07 AM, VinsCool said:

I'm sorry, I simply don't understand what the problem is, really ?
I personally liked the way I did my version, but I imagine there's always room for improvements  

 

It's all lazer and synth sounds and then...

 

 

it's just a a few seconds over 3 mins of goodness?

Edited February 12, 2021 by rensoup

[emkay]

3 hours ago, rensoup said:

 

It's all lazer and synth sounds and then...

 

 

it's just a a few seconds over 3 mins of goodness?

Funny enough that we don't share the same taste in music but recognize the same "difference"

 

 

 

 

 

[VinsCool]

Tried something a little different with the video format.
An old soundtrack, featuring real hardware recording.
 

Haydenwoffle - Atari PoKEY Soundtrack (Recorded from Real Hardware)

 
The audio itself is available in the GDRIVE folder I shared in the previous page of this thread too.

I'll make a couple more uploads like this, with a bunch of stuff I never released as well, soon  

[emkay]

 

 

Nice to hear "real" recordings. Not those "stereo quirks".

One POKEY set to the center of the speakers.

Also, those real recordings show that Altirra still sounds to much of plastic.

And "Squirrel's Hideout"

[VinsCool]

6 hours ago, emkay said:

Nice to hear "real" recordings. Not those "stereo quirks".

One POKEY set to the center of the speakers.

Also, those real recordings show that Altirra still sounds to much of plastic.

Altirra has been surprisingly really good from my own tests, everything expected in Altirra happened on hardware almost exactly the same, which is really good news to me.
Hardware has that hum and hiss that doesn't exist on emulator, however, and seems to not clip as much as higher volume, so a few things that sounded distorted on emulator sounded perfect on hardware, which is once again really good news  

I think the real deal was how my cover of Battle Squadron was behaving on hardware. I used a PAL 800xl, the executable ran at 100hz, and everything I had finely put together using Altirra as a reference was accurately reproduced, and sounded even better than ever.
The only downside was that when I recorded individual audio channels, few things were impossible to fully predict because of the nature of the chip, such as buzzy Distortion C bass timbres or noise.

My oscilloscope and the sound recorded from the full tune didn't 100% match visually because of it, since I basically had to record that tune 5 times, once for each channel, but it was good enough to for me.
The pulses manipulation using high pass filter were perfect however, because I had absolute control on them, they were predicted and very consistent. As show in the channel 2 of that video, the pulses were exactly how calculated throughout the entire song, and leaving it to loop for several times still produced identical results, hahaha.

I have more stuff planned to be recorded that way too. Not everything will be recorded 5 times to make fancy visuals however, because that takes time to actually record and synchronise everything  
One thing I can say for sure, however, all my future work will (and should!) be intended for real hardware playback accuracy, and now I know Altirra is a really good emulator to get the overall idea of what it should sound like  

The RMT2LZSS conversions also make things a lot easier for me, for example using the volume offset to mute channels, that saves a lot of time over editing the .rmt modules several times  

Anyway speaking of hardware recording, I have got this edit you sent me a while ago that I really liked. I had changed it a little bit, but the overall idea is still there. The end section sounds so organic, compared to what I originally did.
This is actually where I began to understand how the chip really worked, and has since been the design I have used and improved for my later songs.
 

I might try to touch it up a little more someday and make a new upload to replace the version I have made first, which I can tell isn't very good compared to what I can do now.
This edit however, sounded great on hardware  I recorded it off the PAL 800xl as well.
 

[ivop]

15 minutes ago, VinsCool said:

Altirra has been surprisingly really good from my own tests, everything expected in Altirra happened on hardware almost exactly the same, which is really good news to me.
Hardware has that hum and hiss that doesn't exist on emulator, however, and seems to not clip as much as higher volume, so a few things that sounded distorted on emulator sounded perfect on hardware, which is once again really good news  

Not clipping as much with a higher volume is due to the analog nature of the audio mixer on real hardware. It goes through several opamps (at least two), and some RC filters.

 

IIRC Altirra downsamples from 1.7x Mhz down to 48kHz in two steps. I don't recall if it does any analog simulation. @phaeron can tell you more about that.

 

Years ago, I modelled the whole audio circuitry in Spice, including GTIA and SIO Audio In mixing into the final signal, and the circuitry in the 1010. There was this thing where somebody played music echoed through the 1010. Can't recall the details. Should be on a backup somewhere ?

 

Anyway, a Spice simulation like this cannot be run in real time. But if you could record the full 1.7x MHz stream, you can run it through post-processing as much as you like, without it having to be real-time.

[VinsCool]

5 minutes ago, ivop said:

Not clipping as much with a higher volume is due to the analog nature of the audio mixer on real hardware. It goes through several opamps (at least two), and some RC filters.

That would make a lot of sense. I noticed real hardware was also quieter, and I had to manually amplify the sound when I had it recorded, but the quality doesn't suffer from it, thankfully.

[phaeron]

Altirra does do some analog simulation, but it's an approximation of the real hardware. There are two main sources of non-linear mixing that it simulates, one being rise/fall times from POKEY's output, and the other being dynamic clipping of peaks in the amplifier. The non-linear mixing simulation can be toggled; you'll get clearer output without it but some effects will not reproduce, so YMMV with regard to accuracy. The audio rendering pipeline produces square waves from each channel at 3.58MHz (half cycles due to timing delays in high pass), downfiltered to an intermediate stream at 63KHz, which is then downfiltered again to the final output which is usually at 48KHz. The 4.00-test releases have some improvements with a retuned, lighter non-linear saturation curve, an improved 8-tap filter bank for less aliasing in the first downsampling pass, and emulation of non-even volume bits.

 

Note that the analog behavior of the computer's output is dependent upon circuitry that varies between computer models. Altirra's output is tuned against scope measurements from an NTSC 800XL at various points in the amplifier circuits.

 

There are some additional sub-cycle effects that are not emulated yet due to complexity, such as varying rise/fall rates and switching delays for the output gates on individual volume bits. Most of the time this is not noticeable, but it can become a factor when doing high-speed interference effects like PDM or percussive instruments with noise channels.

 

[emkay]

1 hour ago, VinsCool said:

That would make a lot of sense. I noticed real hardware was also quieter, and I had to manually amplify the sound when I had it recorded, but the quality doesn't suffer from it, thankfully.

What you experienced is the difference max voltage of a DIN Interface and a Cinch Interface. 

DIN is about 0.7 to 0.8 V while Cinch is about 1V  . 

 

And this is some point that really isn't to understand.

The Audio Part is using German "Deutsche Industrie Norm" for Audio (and the Power supply plug). 

But the Video doesn't even barely use the German TV standard "PAL" ... except the needed timing to have the visuals compatible to PAL timings and the phase inversion. 

[VinsCool]

Tried to be a little more creative with the video format for this one!
The Tower of Turmoil - The Atari PoKEY Cover Soundtrack (Recorded from Real Hardware)
 

The audio itself is also available in the GDRIVE folder I posted in the other page.  

[VinsCool]

Been revisiting an old tune of mine, been a lot of fun to design so far