I second the motion. Cat-o-meter for president!#$%#.. I mean.. for tshirts.
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Here's a "tutorial" how to make a simple tune... or more like I tested out the youtube annotation tool without much planning what to show in the video. Pardon the crap song. Also, fraps ate the cursor so it's kinda hard to follow what happens.
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Montreal, Canada
Also started writing tutorials for it on ma blog. Basic stuff for now, but I wanted to start at the beginning so most of this first tutorial will not exactly be news to anyone here. Might help complete noobs however. Eventually I'll get into the nitty gritty.
have a look-see
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Psydney, Australia
So much goodness all of a sudden!
/me has a look-see
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Montreal, Canada
Second tutorial/user-manual-type-thing is up!
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Yay! These writings are extremely nice in that they might help users as opposed to my shitty docs! BTW, the POKEY sounds (from Atari 8-bit family) are stable if you use KSYNC. It's a very temperamental chip.
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Montreal, Canada
Haha yeah I know it's "stable" but it's kind of all discordant and doesn't really give you notes you can play with, that's what I meant. It has some very nice textures to it, but it's never like.. a full octave of it. C will bleep, D will growl, E will murder a bunny and dance it its blood, F will be silent.. that's what I meant 
I still have no idea what it does really. I mean, how the sounds are actually generated and why they sound the way they do so that's why I left this section nebulous a bit. But if I ever am wrong about something I say, or lack information you deem crucial, do tell me! I'll make changes. I figure I'll already have to make changes anyways as bugs are fixed or new options implemented so I fully expect to have to rewrite some of that later on
But don't diss your docs. They are very useful. Whereas my blog is more of an 'explanation' of what things do, your wiki acts as a great reference manual for when you already know something, but forgot how to actually use it. I still refer to it constantly even a year later 
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That's the beauty of the chip. Only a few of the "waveforms" produce tones, some produce looped noise. In fact, everything is based on "sampling" cyclic noise at set periods. Depending on how the two loops sync, it might generate tones, noise or just silence.
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Guys, I just fixed a bug in the player routine that disabled resonance when the cutoff related commands were used in the pattern (instrument program did not do this) and also if 29xx was used at all - in the program or the pattern. This means while it works correctly now, older songs might sound different. 
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Montreal, Canada
w00t thanks!
I'll have to edit a few old songs now 
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Joliette, QC, Canada
n00bstar wrote:
Haha yeah I know it's "stable" but it's kind of all discordant and doesn't really give you notes you can play with, that's what I meant. It has some very nice textures to it, but it's never like.. a full octave of it. C will bleep, D will growl, E will murder a bunny and dance it its blood, F will be silent.. that's what I meant
I still have no idea what it does really. I mean, how the sounds are actually generated and why they sound the way they do so that's why I left this section nebulous a bit. But if I ever am wrong about something I say, or lack information you deem crucial, do tell me! I'll make changes. I figure I'll already have to make changes anyways as bugs are fixed or new options implemented so I fully expect to have to rewrite some of that later on
But don't diss your docs. They are very useful. Whereas my blog is more of an 'explanation' of what things do, your wiki acts as a great reference manual for when you already know something, but forgot how to actually use it. I still refer to it constantly even a year later
If it's taken from the real Pokey chip, check out documentations about this Atari 8Bit computer's soundchip. Big chances that it will help you on this quest !!!
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Montreal, Canada
Yeah it is based on the actual chip. And I've read the entire specs for the chip (http://www.retromicro.com/files/atari/8bit/pokey.pdf) and I think it broke my brain. I mean I can see them giving instruction on how to generate musical notes with it, but as far as I know this doesn't translate to how klystrack emulates it... at least not inside a single instrument.... Maybe through a combination of multiple instrument it would be possible to generate a full octave of musical notes, but if I'm not mistaken this wasn't the intention in klystrack. But... I honestly don't know, and it's not documented on KT's wiki.
All I know is it makes weird noise things
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I guess most routines for the real chip have tables for which periods give which notes (kinda like routines for the VCS). In klystrack the period is calculated so it doesn't always hit the "clean" periods. Also, since you might get silence if you change the period/waveform at just the right time, Atari routines usually sort of count cycles/reset the chip waveform or something - if I understood it correctly. In fact, I don't even want to understand it.