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ChipMusic.org / Forums / Posts by 4mat
Been mostly doing the backend stuff on this. (like SID file loading, memory management and keyboard handlers) Anyway I've been working on some FX, a few of which are simulators for making your tracks sound like they're playing on other chip hardware. Here's AY and NES:
And here's Spectrum beeper, going in the style of the 'pulsewidth' ones:
Like the other fx they'll have some adjustable parameters, but obviously there's only so much authenticity you can get this way.
edit: sorry misread the question, this answer is about the emulators rather than Cheesecutter. 
I've run the Vice emulator on an Intel Atom powered netbook from 2009, I think it was even alright with resid-FP enabled to an extent (the really accurate SID emulation) but you can fall back to fast SID which would be fine. Really depends how old a laptop you want to go with, there are the emulators we used in the '90s like CCS64 which runs fine on old Pentiums. But SID emulation has had the most improvements in the last few years really and with that has come a big leap in processor requirements, so I guess it depends how accurate you want to go. Vice's resid-FP is incredibly accurate these days.
The really super old DOS emulators like C64S aren't really recommended because the sound emulation isn't very close to how the hardware behaves, though of course it was fine for the time. (and fast.. you could run that on 486s) Some of them don't even emulate the filters so you'd be missing out on a very important part of the sound.
4mat wrote:Yes exactly, it wasn't unheard of to end up with only 20-30k free for audio on an amiga game. Had to work in that space myself.
Oh that's an interesting point. So the reliance on simple waveforms and older music sounds was driven by its own technological limitations. The processor was ready for sampled audio, but not the storage media. And of course there was no mp3.
Indeed, at the time this was all 'cutting-edge' and, as musicians, priced a lot lower than comparable pro hardware. If when the Amiga had come out there had been a machine with, say, 32 digi channels for the same price we'd probably have bought that instead. I don't think anyone was thinking about forced limitations because this was 'teh future'.
Yes exactly, it wasn't unheard of to end up with only 20-30k free for audio on an amiga game. Had to work in that space myself.
4mat wrote:Chip sample tracker modules weren't called chipmusic because they used 'chips' of a bigger sound, it was because the small-form waveforms resembled the sounds from the old SID/AY etc. chips, rather than full samples.
So would it be accurate to say that chipmusic has been 'retro' since the beginning? As a music culture?
Personally I'd say no because the c64 was still a commercially active machine when chipmusic drivers were happening on the Amiga. Even some early games had chipmusic-like tracks instead of the common sample-based ones. It was more of a 'we can do this as well' thing than nostalgia I think, plus economically from a size POV having a chip song in a cracktro or game makes sense.
Alright. Well does everything else I posted seem accurate to you?
Yeah seems fine
Chip sample tracker modules weren't called chipmusic because they used 'chips' of a bigger sound, it was because the small-form waveforms resembled the sounds from the old SID/AY etc. chips, rather than full samples.
So you want to inject into the sid data from each channel?That's really cool. What kind of effects would you do? Any ideas? I guess some are obvious, like delay, pitch bend... Stutter. Is that the kind of stuff you had in mind?
Thanks. Yes there'll be stuff for waveform replacement for incoming channels, pitch etc. The current plan is to have 3 fx busses with 3 chained fx in each. Each one of those will be a 'virtual sid' with 4 inputs & outputs. (channels+filter) First FX in a bus will only take inputs from the tracks, but 2 & 3 will add inputs from the previous FX stages. As you can output to the SID(s) at any point (or direct from the tracks) you should be able to have more smaller busses or 9 single FX. I've got some of this working so far, but the amount of simultaneous ones will depend on how much cpu I have left really. The FX setup will be per mixer state though, and currently I have room for 10 states that can be switched between live.
Now the AY player is done I've started having a look through my other WIP projects to work on. I've decided to give the Sid Remix tool a proper look and see how it goes. Here's current progress:
Currently you can run 3 source songs in sync (with timing adjustments) and pipe their channels and filters out to up to 3 sid chips in any order. The next thing I'm looking at is the fx busses, which will allow you to start manipulating the data as it passes from input to output.
Song credits (from top to bottom on the left) : "Shorty" by Dane , "Lightforce" by Rob Hubbard and "Crazy Comets" also by Rob. I'm cherry picking channels from all 3 songs and piping them out to 2 sid chips on the right.
There's probably more to be found in it though, as the guy said there's not much development going on around it, whereas the c64 is in almost constant R&D.
err.. it's not more powerful than a c64, no.
The other channels are software generated. A while back Aleksi wrote a software SID emulator for the Vic-20 so it's similar to that. You have 5 generated pulsewave channels played through the volume register to go with the 3 sid channels. All channel's contents and independent of each other, though there are some limits with the generated channels which are in the pdf.
Aleksi Eeben has written a new tracker that gives you up to 8 channels on a single (6581) sid. There are some limitations with the extra channels so make sure you read the docs.
When you save your song out it's an executable file.
There's always going to be somebody doing this stuff, but a lot of scenes or individuals either don't know or aren't interested in the 'chipscene'. That's fair enough. Case in point would be the C64 demoscene, where there are plenty of music uploads every month but very little crossover here. (as with the tracking scene people just never stopped since the '80s) If we keep looking for this stuff in the same places then yeah it's going to look like it's on the way out.
Last bit of polish, adding a "smart" buzz simulation that uses 2 channels when free to simulate the buzzer harmonics.
Many '82-'84 era C64 games used classical pieces, some of it baroque. Mainly (I assume) because it was out of copyright but also the SID chip was one of the few home machines at the time that could do multi-voice music. The tracks back then were usually quite literal note conversions without much attention paid to dynamics, or animation in the instrumentation. A lot of that tech wasn't fully explored until Rob Hubbard etc. started working on there.
ChipMusic.org / Forums / Posts by 4mat