POKEY Intonation

[ivop]

Okay, I'll bite. Your last 80s mix suffers from the drums having way to much frequency content. Especially the snare drum. It almosts sounds like a repeating organ tone, and hence, out of tune with the rest of the song. The only parts that sound properly are those without drums, like the Nik Kershaw bit. Fix your snare drum, and it'll sound a LOT better. As far as I can hear in between the drums, the other channels seem in tune.

 

[+CharlieChaplin]

The 80s mix is hardly recognizable. Well, it is to me, because...

 

Ryan Paris (Dolce Vita) meets Nik Kershaw (The Riddle). My mother had (or maybe still has?) Ryan Paris on Vinyl, I had Nik Kershaw on Vinyl (now only on CD) and I prefer to listen to that media (Vinyl/CD) than those Pokey mixes.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weMrzt6W8V8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDygS0a6Tgo

 

Think most other Atarians that do not own that music (or listened to it in the 80s and/or watched it on MTV) will not recognize it at all.

 

[abstractcache]

SID emulation on POKEY doesn't seem to have the out of tune situation. A new tracker based on SID emu (and not limited to the SID) would be good. Something similar to Ubiks Music on the 64. The volume only bits on POKEY, I'd guess that Atari engineers enabled that for a good reason. To allow full control of the speaker. The built in waveforms were probably not intended for superlative music. Afterall, I read somewhere that POKEY has undocumented secrets. 

[ivop]

The downside of using a SID emulator (like atarisid) is that it uses 90-95% CPU time, approaching 100% at peak times. Not much left for a display, let alone a game.

 

You can just use GoatTracker, and after conversion to atarisid, you can replay it with whatever waveforms you can define in 256 bytes of data.

 

Currently, atarisid 6.1 uses channel one for the 15.6kHz timer, and the other three channels to replay either samples, or noise. The latter is done by a native Pokey noise generator. If you can assure the first SID voice never uses noise, you can get away with three pokey channels. Channel one will serve both the timer interrupt and a volume only channel. CPU cost will be the same though. Now cut out SID voice 3, and it'll take only two pokey channels and perhaps 25% less CPU time. Then can you play a modified RMT2LZSS on Pokey channel 3 and 4 and have a decent title screen, for example. Not a game though.

 

I have mentioned these ideas several times on AA, but nobody has ever picked up the glove, so to speak Me neither, although I did some experiments with different waveforms. I call it atarisid and/or SID emulation, but underneath it's just a generic softsynth.

Edited February 4, 2021 by ivop