Looking for VCS musician - I've got a tracker - do you have the balls?
category: music [glöplog]
I've got a bunch of ideas to code for my next VCS demo, but I need musical support.
I have the beta version of a new 8 (actually the first) cross platform VCS tracker at hand.
So if you think you can squeeze something good out of more constraints you've ever thought of, please contact me!
jac at wudsn.com
I have the beta version of a new 8 (actually the first) cross platform VCS tracker at hand.
So if you think you can squeeze something good out of more constraints you've ever thought of, please contact me!
jac at wudsn.com
Sounds interesting ;)
One-note samba, anyone?
Interesting indeed :)
i wrote a mail. not sure if it made it all the way through the spam filter, because it had the word "tracker" in the subject line.
WOW, I got six replies by now (which is 6 more than expected and also 4.5 more than active musicians for the VCS until today). Totally different people with different styles and background. This is very exciting, espcially because none of them luckily mentioned one-note samba.
You all should have received a short mail with the available infos now. More will be sent out by the end of the week.
So if everything turns out right, there might a demo with something that has no be there on the VCS before: More than 1 tune :-)
You all should have received a short mail with the available infos now. More will be sent out by the end of the week.
So if everything turns out right, there might a demo with something that has no be there on the VCS before: More than 1 tune :-)
VCS musicdisk?
THIS
IS
MADNESS!
THIS
IS
MADNESS!
THE BALLS? THIS THREAD IS MISOGYNISTIC. THERE ARE WOMEN WHO MAKE MUSIC.
<stereotype>everybody knows women push pixels rather than using trackers. </stereotype>
Just googled "MISOGYNISTIC" and "WOMEN" and found that knl is of course perfectly right. Will spawn a separate thread and add ask SvOlli to add the option for pastel colors to the tracker, too ;-)
Just because there are of course men how prefer pastel colors, I mean.
Just because there are of course men how prefer pastel colors, I mean.
Quote:
So if everything turns out right, there might a demo with something that has no be there on the VCS before: More than 1 tune :-)
That would be awesome! But let's see what happens first if you run low on ROM with your effects code and data. :)
Can you tell us more about this tracker? Who is behind it? When will it be public?
It would be a great step towards getting more musicians to try the craziness that is the TIA chip with all it limitations.
It would be a great step towards getting more musicians to try the craziness that is the TIA chip with all it limitations.
@wysiwtf: actually, there are more women than men in my agency… but most women are designers or project managers and most men are developers… not that we don't want to employ female developers, it's just they don't seem to want to apply.
@JAC!: We had two tunes in Tricade, as the two banks don't share any music or player data.
Come to think of it, we did the same in Doctor as well.
@visy: Looks like it's been some time that I wached Doctor. I actually only remembered the first tune, which is one of my absolute favourites :-)
@Kylearan: Let's see, currently I still have 32k free, if you know what I mean.
@Sdw: The tracker was done by SvOlli and used for the tune in Bang! But he's been busy with other stuff, so the originally planned released was shifted shifted.... So I asked him to for "limited availability" because I'd rather have something that's working halfway than nothing that works perfectly. Actually kk showed by his totally cool VST plugin last year. It's superior in many ways (except memory consumption). But since it's not released - and I don't see when that will happen - I choose the path for now. Otherwise he'll win simply because there's no other entry at SV - and what victory would that be :-)
@Kylearan: Let's see, currently I still have 32k free, if you know what I mean.
@Sdw: The tracker was done by SvOlli and used for the tune in Bang! But he's been busy with other stuff, so the originally planned released was shifted shifted.... So I asked him to for "limited availability" because I'd rather have something that's working halfway than nothing that works perfectly. Actually kk showed by his totally cool VST plugin last year. It's superior in many ways (except memory consumption). But since it's not released - and I don't see when that will happen - I choose the path for now. Otherwise he'll win simply because there's no other entry at SV - and what victory would that be :-)
And since when women dont have balls? It´s the stuff you mistake for the womens eyes all the time! :p
OnTopic: Is the TIA in the VCS any different to the ones in the Ataris (XL/XE) when it comes to sound-generation?
I remember having fiddled around with some sound-code for VCS some years ago...was really hard to find notes that didnt sound wrong. It´s up to 30% off, right? Hope SVOlli found some evil ways to avoid mis-sounding notes, else the musicians up to the task will have a hard time! :) But thats what the scene is about, making the best out of given limitations! (And Friendship ofcoz!)
OnTopic: Is the TIA in the VCS any different to the ones in the Ataris (XL/XE) when it comes to sound-generation?
I remember having fiddled around with some sound-code for VCS some years ago...was really hard to find notes that didnt sound wrong. It´s up to 30% off, right? Hope SVOlli found some evil ways to avoid mis-sounding notes, else the musicians up to the task will have a hard time! :) But thats what the scene is about, making the best out of given limitations! (And Friendship ofcoz!)
Yeah, the TIA only has 5-bit frequency control, so unless they have added some software modulation that would consume all the CPU-time and leave no time for effects, musicians will need to be creative! :)
hardy: You can construct various tuning. Check the Atari 2600 Frequency And Tuning Chart for some that people have already figured out. It's also possible to construct tunings where you have two or three octaves with the same notes in them. AUDCx = 4 (square wave, div 1) examples:
and
and (this one is most awful)
These work for any sound type, if you care more about having bass/melody sounding similar than tunings (like having a square and a saw channel playing the same/similar patterns)
I'll take the opportunity to add that the Slocum player has next to no envelope control, which at least I am rather tired of hearing. 4-bit per-channel volume control is one of the few good things about the TIA, so try to make use of it. kk's player seems to remedy this, and my own modified Slocum player has built-in decay at a cost of two bytes of RAM
It's also possible to bang out 4-bit PCM by setting AUDCx = 0 and modulating AUDVx, or 5-bit PCM by setting both AUDC0 and AUDC1 = 0 and setting AUDV0 = sample >> 1, AUDV1 = (sample + 1) >> 1, see Sound Coder. If you only do 4-bit PCM then the other channel is of course free for "normal" music. Note that PCM output takes precious raster time (limiting possible effects), and getting artifact free output while maintaining VSYNC is *difficult* (so far no one seems to have done it)
Code:
AUDFx note cents off
%00011111 B4 -23
%00011011 C#5 +8
%00010111 E5 -25
%00010011 G5 -9
%00001111 B5 -23
%00001101 C#6 +8
%00001011 E6 -25
%00001001 G6 -9
%00000111 B6 -23
%00000110 C#7 +8
%00000101 E7 -25
%00000100 G7 -9
%00000011 B7 -23
and
Code:
AUDFx note cents off
%00011111 B4 -23
%00011101 C5 -11
%00010111 E5 -25
%00010011 G5 -9
%00010001 A5 -27
%00001111 B5 -23
%00001110 C6 -11
%00001011 E6 -25
%00001001 G6 -9
%00001000 A6 -27
%00000111 B6 -23
and (this one is most awful)
Code:
AUDFx note cents off
%00010111 E5 -25
%00010101 F5 +26
%00010011 G5 -9
%00010001 A5 -27
%00001111 B5 -23
%00001101 C#6 +8
%00001011 E6 -25
%00001010 F6 +25
%00001001 G6 -9
%00001000 A6 -27
%00000111 B6 -23
%00000110 C#7 +8
%00000101 E7 -25
These work for any sound type, if you care more about having bass/melody sounding similar than tunings (like having a square and a saw channel playing the same/similar patterns)
I'll take the opportunity to add that the Slocum player has next to no envelope control, which at least I am rather tired of hearing. 4-bit per-channel volume control is one of the few good things about the TIA, so try to make use of it. kk's player seems to remedy this, and my own modified Slocum player has built-in decay at a cost of two bytes of RAM
It's also possible to bang out 4-bit PCM by setting AUDCx = 0 and modulating AUDVx, or 5-bit PCM by setting both AUDC0 and AUDC1 = 0 and setting AUDV0 = sample >> 1, AUDV1 = (sample + 1) >> 1, see Sound Coder. If you only do 4-bit PCM then the other channel is of course free for "normal" music. Note that PCM output takes precious raster time (limiting possible effects), and getting artifact free output while maintaining VSYNC is *difficult* (so far no one seems to have done it)
Yep, used Slocum´s player...seems everyone did until some short time ago...
Oh my, this is just horrible :X
"Nobody knows the trouble I've seen...!"
But seriously, yeah, my appreciation of the talents of ilmarque, Tjoppen and all the other VCS musicians are a lot higher after I read into the limits of TIA and how difficult it is to make anything sound listenable :D
But seriously, yeah, my appreciation of the talents of ilmarque, Tjoppen and all the other VCS musicians are a lot higher after I read into the limits of TIA and how difficult it is to make anything sound listenable :D
Wait, there's a tracker now? I *need* this in my life :D hook me up yo! :D
Oh, in case anyone's interested here's a little SDL based program I wrote a while back that turns your keyboard into a sort of VCS sound board: vcs_keyboard. You use the 8x4 key matrix inside the Z-to-8 rectangle on a normal QWERTY keyboard, and you can change sound types with 0-9 on the keypad. Should give you a nice idea what's possible
And thus in 2014 it came to pass that all of a sudden, there were more musicians than coders for the Atari VCS 2600. Pure music cartridges with no visual effects flooded Pouet. Because of the competition, music quality skyrocketed up to the point where YouTube's automatic GEMA scanner started to block VCS demos that had remixes of commercial music. Batari Basic became the most-used language for VCS demos because it enabled musicians to code their music selection menus themselves. HardTIA sound cards were produced so that PC users could listen to VCS tunes in original quality. And all the while, the last three VCS coders left in the scene silently wept that they still had to use fugly dasm while the musicians had all that powerful enabling technology at their fingertips...