Vuurniac

Thanks, too bad I couldn't really add those 1-frame noise hihats I wanted because there is no such way to use the overlay percussion feature. I have something in mind that I would do for my own custom engine though, and might be useful or possible to add to TIATracker as well. That would be introducing an 8-bit hi-hat sequencer. Every bit in the byte means whether to play a 1-frame noise (or some other) sound on the current row. This might require another byte of RAM, unless you keep the hi-hat sequence fixed throughout the entire song, in which case it could be part of the song header data in the ROM.

I put this together in my last few days of freedom. I can make the module available somewhere as well upon request.

I have recently created a player for the NES that (at of a cost of 47.7% of the CPU time) is capable of playing 7-bit sampled audio at a sampling rate of 8 272Hz. I'm wondering about the possibilities with the 2600, especially some method that could work in games. A music player that would update AUDV0 on every second scanline could produce 4-bit sound at 7 860 Hz, which is enough for music like this. I made this with a bit crusher plugin just to get an idea of what it would sound like. This piece is the Ant Caves theme from MediEvil for the PlayStation. At this rate, you can pack two samples into a single byte, so the space cost is half the sampling rate, 3 930 bytes per second. This song in particular would be 7 860Hz×126 seconds / 2 = 495 180 bytes. This would fit perfectly in a 512k cartridge, but who's saying you'd need over two minutes of music in total? Taking summed output and streaming it to a channel output? It's been done before in Pitfall II, it's been done in Stella's Stocking, and in Cheitiry. My question would be... is this a rational proposition?

Hey, I have tried my luck with the new release and I think I'll have to go back to the beta because although the skipping is a lot more consistent now, this resuts in certain frames of the envelopes just completely not existing. Like let's say I have a basic instrument with two entries: 5 15. Ideally when I let go of the key it should make a pop at volume 15 and then stop, but the 15 entry is NEVER played. Just never. Similar things happen with percussive instruments, now the first frame of every percussion instrument just does not happen, and TIAtracker is still nowhere near to using all the CPU time of my computer. So I would love to test this more and make some more music with it but sadly I can't.

I don't think there's anything special here, I'm running a 64-bit Windows 7 OS, so there should be no issues there... But anyway, here's my new song... once I figure out how to work with the overlay percussion instruments I might add a few hi-hats to Channel 2: https://soundcloud.com/hunretrogeek/atari-2600-music-solid-gas

This may not have been brought to your attention, or the problem might be unique to my system, but every time I attempt to name my instruments it crashes tracker. Usually I have enough time to hit maybe 3 keys before the collapse...

Thank you for the feedback I'm already quite happy with the way things are in the old version except for the fact that the tracker seems to be dropping frames quite often so things sound a bit jittery and not exactly the way I intended. I'm happy to take what I've learned over the past years and bring it to this system. In fact I would love to create music for demos or games. The challenge aspect that comes from the terrible 5-bit frequency divider is very interesting to me. Also, I haven't looked at any assembly sources but is it possible to get the processing done sqeezed into the kernel? At least during scanlines where you know for a fact that there is no need to send any new data to the TIA, like a status bar border? I imagine that is one way to get more processing time out of the machine as well as chopping up some of your code into short sections and executing the bits on every scanline instead of writing to WSYNC immediately after all the TIA-related business is taken care of.

Hey, this is looking like a wonderful piece of software! I will surely keep using it. Sadly I failed at assembling a binary but I've posted my first song to Youtube just so that I can show you. I've been working with other systems like the NES and the Genesis for years, and when I have time I also program for the former and I've always wanted to see what I could accomplish with something as limited as the 2600. Keep it up, this will make it so much easier until I can get a grasp of how the peripherals of the system work to write my own engine eventually.