goto80
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CHIPTUNE

So the wavetable can use several voices for one sound? A snare drum could take up noise->pulse->noise? Or rather noise+pulse at the same time? I like that idea though. One track to rule them all, argh! I think SDi on C64 uses a related approach, with having a virtual track for effects (and samples?).

I remember that someone did a SID-tune with about 7 channels. The 'songs' started with one note and gradually added notes to end up with a mega-chord. It was basically just arpeggiators, but as I remember it it sounded slightly less discretey (hm, new word?). Can't remember any names, hmm.

neilbaldwin
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WOW MAN!

Yes, precisely. It can use all of them, if you really want to smile

Remember that very first Nijuu demo I did? The drums were actually made using triangle and noise (like normal) but I also had drums that had very short two-note chords in them too so they were using all four NES voices sometimes.

http://dutycyclegenerator.com/sound/Nijuu%20Test.mp3

You can hear the "chord" trick starting about 0:50

SDi does have a fourth track but it's only for effects (controlling the filter, tempo, speed table stuff etc).

Wow, 7 tracks! See if you can find that, I'd love to hear it.

akira^8GB
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New York City
neilbaldwin wrote:

I'll have to have a look at the Frantic one then Anders (if it's available?)

Frantic's productions are usually only available to himself. and Anders xD

For all I know, they could all be vapourware, Anders just invented an animation for defMON and put it on youtube!!! tongue

goto80
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CHIPTUNE

Busted -- scheisse!

But this player is a different weapon of Frantic's. I'm telling him to release it, but, well... Access is so past millennium! smile

logikstate
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Based on that dissasembly I've created a C version of Rob's Replay and hooked it up to a SID emulator.  I then put the replay into a clone of ProTracker and then wrote a ripper that will rip quite a lot of Rob's tunes and even those not written by Rob himself (but using his replay)

I've not got everything playing properly just yet but quite a few are mostly there.

Check it out:


goto80
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CHIPTUNE

I saw this one, yeah. Great work! It's surreal to see this, really smile So not all Hubbard's songs can be converted? Is that because your converter doesn't support all his players, or something else?

I'm really looking forward to see more of this. Keep us posted!

neilbaldwin
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WOW MAN!
neilbaldwin wrote:

I'll have to have a look at the Frantic one then Anders (if it's available?) - sounds interesting.

Not sure about a completely different approach but my original NES drivers (and then expanded on even further with Nijuu) broke the "one-track-per-hardware-voice" by having virtual tracks. My NES drivers (and Nijuu) use a "drum track" - in essence it's like a simple SFX track, the sounds defined by little "wavetables" and a priority system. Means that the drums can momentarily steal one or more hardware voices.

I guess to take that idea to it's limit, you'd have an arbitrary (and platform agnostic to some extent) number of tracks that were not explicitly tied to any one voice and then you could have polyphonic instruments etc.

I thought about doing this on the NES while I was coding Nijuu but I shelved the idea, for a while at least smile

This topic is all over the place and I apologise for being part of that but it amused me to read this.

Why?

Because only 6 months later, PR8 does exactly what I described here big_smile

The number of tracks in PR8 is arbitrary, they can all use all 5 of the NES's hardware voices simultaneously*. It makes for quite a different approach to sound creating on the NES.

(* obviously, voice 'stealing' goes on....a lot)

logikstate
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goto80 wrote:

I saw this one, yeah. Great work! It's surreal to see this, really smile So not all Hubbard's songs can be converted? Is that because your converter doesn't support all his players, or something else?

I'm really looking forward to see more of this. Keep us posted!

The core of Rob's replay is pretty much the same.  By the core I mean the part that decodes the notes and triggers them.  Later songs start to differ, International Karate was able to transpose patterns to save memory.  Ace II uses arpeggio tables but I haven't set about looking at the changes in the later replays just yet.

Basically each intrument can have a number of effects applied to them, a bit like routing the sound through different patches.  There is a Pulse patch, octave arpeggio patch, skydive patch etc.

These different fx were changed slightly with each tune, basically just tweaking the parameters.

Its possible to collate all these tweaks and make a new replay (which is what Ive started) which would play all Rob's tunes.  The instruments could then be represented on screen like an effects chain in Ableton from left to right.  Some of the fx shared parameters with each other as they used the same byte in memory.  This could be represented by 'syncing' pairs of fx modules together in the chain.

I realise this is pretty crazy stuff, it all started as a learning excersise when I decided to use the dissasembled Monty On the Run source to see how SID tunes worked.  I was mainly interested in the drums, but one thing lead to another and I have what I have now.

I'm more interested in the techniques that were used.  I'm getting into sound synthesis and I've gone back about as far as I can with VGM syth's and started tinkering around to see how thing's were done back then.  I grew up with these games and these sounds so they are pretty close to my heart.

I will keep plugging away at it, I'm thinking about making a retro style game for iPhone/Android etc and this would be nice to do the music with.

Last edited by logikstate (Jan 14, 2011 9:49 am)

vapourmil
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Actually the statement "Hubbard was a geek first and a musician second" is facetious and untrue. In fact, he worked as a professional musician before he worked on computers.

As for writing music in monitors, at the start of the 64 era, this wasn't only done, it was normal if you wanted to source your own tunes. In fact, programmers often began programming in assembler and writing music before they even had a monitor, they'd Poke every byte into RAM from BASIC, then re-write the basic program so it was just a system-call to run the program, then save the lot to disk.

Some simple early assemblers were written this way, those assemblers were used to write better assemblers and these second generation assemblers were used to write games and graphics and music programs: From the moment you switch on a shop-bought C64 you have enough there with BASIC to bootstrap any project you like. That's one of the things that was great about it: A proper self-start home-brew system on which the cottage industry which began the games industry was based.

nitro2k01
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Sweeeeeeden

Now I'm kind of curious. Are there any preserved examples of pre-computer Hubbard music?

4mat
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nitro2k01 wrote:

Now I'm kind of curious. Are there any preserved examples of pre-computer Hubbard music?

yeah there are mp3s floating about of Chimera and Formula 1 he did on a 4-track,  See c64.com

akira^8GB
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New York City
vapourmil wrote:

Actually the statement "Hubbard was a geek first and a musician second" is facetious and untrue. In fact, he worked as a professional musician before he worked on computers.

All of Hubbard's non-C64 music sounds like generic rubbish.

*braces for impact*

ant1
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uhajdafdfdfa
akira^8GB wrote:
vapourmil wrote:

Actually the statement "Hubbard was a geek first and a musician second" is facetious and untrue. In fact, he worked as a professional musician before he worked on computers.

All of Hubbard's non-C64 music sounds like generic rubbish.

*braces for impact*

All of Hubbard's C64 music sounds like generic rubbish too.

*braces for impact*

wedanced
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San Francisco

I agree.
/me jumps with ant1 and akira.
*braces for impact*

4mat
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ant1 wrote:
akira^8GB wrote:

All of Hubbard's non-C64 music sounds like generic rubbish.

*braces for impact*

All of Hubbard's C64 music sounds like generic rubbish too.

*braces for impact*

*braces for impact with Simmons drum solo*