MIDI note range issue w/ Arduinoboy & mGB (Page 1 of 2)

Really? The sound chip is more than capable of making ridiculously high tones. Is there no workaround other than pitch shifting? I find it hard to believe that the sound chip is incapable of making tones that so much original game boy music uses.

Or use a real midi synth.

The Roland A-01 looked intriguing.

I'll have a look into over clocking and see if that can help me out. Thanks for the pointer.

My project involves using a gameboy so I'm not looking for a fancier synth. Guess you have to make to with the limitations that you have! But this is frustrating because from what I can tell this isn't a limitation with how the gameboy can make sound. I think this is a limitation in how it's able to interpret the information it's receiving from the Arduinoboy.  I'm attempting to recreate original gameboy music that I've transcribed as detailed as possible and I feel like this setup is massively unequipped to do what I want :\

Last edited by Ahmaykmewsik (Oct 24, 2016 10:01 pm)

Yeah I also get the sense this shouldn't be happening. I'm hoping this is a unique problem that has an easy fix? Although I'm in the dark on how to modify the Arduino, I bought it pre-built from catskull.

I also took a look at the code. I couldn't make much sense of it either.

I agree, overclocking seems equivalent to giving it steroids to fix what might be a really simple issue, not sure if I want to do that to the poor thing.

I looked up carillon. Is it able to receive MIDI data from an external source? That's the medium I'm working in, not a sequencer. The documentation also recommends only using a Gameboy color and I'm using a DMG. From what I can tell that's not going to work for me.

I experimented more with pitch bending on my mGB setup yesterday and found some other odd behaviors...I'm going to make a video later today so you can see/hear this. Hopefully that might make clear what's going on.

Here's the end game: this is for a music commission for a toy museum (In where I'm wearing the hat of a classical composer - sort of). I've transcribed music from the top 15 Gameboy games according to Wikipedia and have written a "mash up" piece mismatching melodies with the wrong accompaniment, having Tetris morph into Zelda into Super Mario Land into Kirby - that sort of thing, it's fun. I've written this in a music notation software and the song exists as a MIDI file. I'm using Logic on my computer to playback the MIDI and send it through the arduinoboy to mGB. I'm also controlling the pulse waves, envelopes, and pitch shifting/vibrato via MIDI messages, attempting to recreate the original music as closely as possible.

I made a video here that shows what's going on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeZsoSXZaws

There are some loud sounds. Probably don't want to wear headphones.

Setup: The keyboard is connected to a computer, which through Logic outputs MIDI to the Arduinoboy, which sends data to the Gameboy and interpreted by mGB. Audio from the Gameboy is being routed to a speaker.

There's a strange pitch limitation that might be a mGB bug. In the video I only show this happening on the upper bound on the WAV channel, however this also occurs on the other channels and on the lower bound. On WAV, notes after G#4 (MIDI 68) don't play correctly. They sound as if they were the lowest note the sound chip can produce. However pitches play correctly to a certain point if the pitch shift is being used, and the new upper limit becomes what would be the pitch B7 regardless of how the pitch shifter is set. If pitch shifting is done outside of this range, some very strange microtonal sounds result. A possible avenue for some cool experimentation, but I think this upper limit is a bug with mGB and if you'll excuse the dumb pun it's pretty "limiting"...the Gameboy is definitely capable of producing the notes that aren't working as you can tell by the microtonal randomness the pitch shifting produces.

When I'm clicking with the mouse mouse button, I am sending a MIDI message that sets the pitch shifter range to it's highest possible value: 127. In the mGB documentation it says the shifter only works up to an octave (12) and in mGB itself you can set it up to 48, but you can set it to be as large a value as the MIDI can send(127), and it will still function. However when the pitch shifter is set this high there is some sort of overflow happening in the software and it results in some very unusual scales and notes, some of which are far outside what can be normally produced. If what's happening here can be reverse engineered, I'm thinking that I may be able to cheat and get the few higher notes that I need (in WAV: C8, C#8, D8, etc.) if this upper bound issue can't be solved.