Well, I decided to open up my first Atari blog ... the first of many I hope.

A bit about me, I am an Atari enthusiast from Knoxville, Tennessee. I started with an Atari 600XL in 1984, progressed to Atari ST and Amiga computers, and eventually even released my own iTunes album of 80's inspired synthpop music, all created using an Atari ST computer. I then caught the emulation bug and got back into retro Atari programming.

Well, I found out recently that a guy named PacManPlus is programming a platform game for the 7800 called "Bentley Bear: Crystal Quest" and he needed someone to do POKEY music for his game. I used to mess around with POKEY stuff back in the day, so I thought I'd give it a go. It has been a real adventure so far for me, considering I haven't even messed with chip music in about 25 years. A lot to re-learn.

For those who have forgotten, Bentley Bear was the protagonist in the Atari arcade game "Crystal Castles", quite a fun game. I noticed the original arcade game had bits of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite in it, so I decided for this project, I would stick with the classical music theme as well.

Currently, I have music for 3 levels done, plus title music and end level music. Unfortunately, I seem to have hit a snag. The problem: I want to use 16-bit POKEY sound for the title music and end level - defeat boss music. For those not in the know, the POKEY chip has 4 sound channels by default, but one of the drawbacks is that you can't get really good bass sounds out of it. One way around this is to combine two channels, which gives you 65,536 frequency settings to choose from (instead of the normal 256), by setting a value in the AUDCTL register. Using this method, you essentially have a 9-octave range for your music now.

In practice (and in the emulator) this works awesomely. The title music has a definite Nintendo quality to it. Unfortunately, this is proving hard to work on the actual 7800 hardware, PacManPlus is reporting that the bass track seems not to be playing when it is called. It may be a problem with the emulator, maybe the POKEY is laid out differently on the 7800, there may be a coding issue, but it's been a real mystery. Anyone who has ever programmed sound on the 7800 POKEY, if you've got any suggestions, I'd love to hear them! I'd really love to stick with the 16-bit sound for this music, I think it would really lift the quality of the game.

Time to go ... wish me luck.