rensoup
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Posts posted by rensoup
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Importing NES may be possible but it has more channels I believe.
MODS are nice because of the 4 channels and huge library.
I considered more amiga formats like fc13/14 sidmon,... but there aren't that many tunes...
C64 tunes may be an option too.
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17 hours ago, MrFish said:
It all depends on the MOD file, and what the converter (RMT, in my case) is capable of doing with it. I've imported some that sounded pretty weird (and possibly useless) too; but -- as with those two that I posted above -- I've gotten a fair amount that are worth using. I could see where, if you were looking for a particular song, you might get stuck with few choices, and nothing that would be helpful. Probably better to find MOD's that convert well, first, and use those (if you can find something of interest). I've mainly downloaded video game and classical music.
Yep totally, some people are happy crafting cool instruments, and that's one way to get more tunes on the A8, unfortunately your PC seems as old as your A8 😶
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OpenMPT has a feature to retune the samples but I'm not sure if it's of any use unless the notes are updated as well ? Otherwise you could just retune and the import in DxRMT.
I'm guessing the FFT experimental test in RMT is similar to the frequency detection in OMPT's retune option.
The goals with MOD import in DxRMT were
1.to demonstrate that it's much easier to add features once you get rid of the 6502 player. it doesn't have to be limited to those. @tatqoo suggested a better arpeggio command based on a C64 tracker for example.
2.To perhaps encourage newcomers with composing experience to try Pokey and find a somewhat familiar environment.
3.To get more content ported to the A8, there are so few people making music on the A8 that making quick quality MOD ports could spark more interest.
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2 hours ago, MrFish said:
I don't have your tracker/conversion utility: so, here's a version using RMT (v1.30). Does that help?
Not quite 😀
But maybe there's an opportunity to learn something. Could anybody explain how to turn an amiga instrument into a pokey instrument when the amiga instrument is not using a standard "key" (if that's the correct word) ?
Is it just a matter of shifting it by one or several semi tones ? if so, is it always possible ?
I'm not sure if RMT is able to correct that issue automatically but it discards the pattern effects anyway so that's no good
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6 hours ago, solo/ng said:
I would love to have export to lzss in the tracker (we use it heavily these days and pretty sure in future too).
I didn't put the option in the tracker itself because RMT2LZSS has a lot of options but it's just a matter of selecting the file once, then you can just click on reimport again which is pretty much just like having it inside the tracker
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2 hours ago, MrFish said:
Here are a couple of MOD's that should go through conversion pretty nicely, if you like. They import straight into RMT well -- if that's any indication.
They don't sound too good unfortunately, probably because the instruments don't use standard tuning, I'm guessing it's easy to fix but being no musician that's beyond my skills.
Perhaps, someone else can give it a shot?
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Here are a bunch of examples. These are just regular mods autotmatically converted to DxRMT using a single instrument which means don't sound that great but demonstrate per-line-tracker-effects.
ancient temple.obx lament for atlantis.obx matkamie.obx PYR.obx WOTW26-jingle.obx xtd-microtune3.obx
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So after trying to rally up the AA masses to this noble cause, It looks like I couldn't convince anybody 😏
So I gave it at shot and implemented a new tracker based on my RMT player in C#
First I'll just summarize the idea for those who don't remember:QuoteRMT works by emulating the 6502 and Pokey. The 6502 runs an instance of the ASM RMT player and outputs RAW Pokey data which is then fed to the Pokey emulator and turned into sampled sound.
So having an editor built on top of that means all sorts of nasty patching into 6502 memory has to be made when editing a tune.
What's worse is that adding news features means they have to be added to the 6502 player (and having to deal with memory and speed issues)
So the idea is to ditch 6502 emulation and the 6502 player and replace it with an easier to maintain/higher level language player. Without a 6502 player nor a regular file format, you're dealing with RAW pokey data which takes huge amounts of space which is fine for a PC tracker but not so much on the A8.
This problem was solved with Dmsc's LZSS compressor which compresses Pokey streams pretty decently and decompresses them very quickly. LZSS was pretty much the first building bloc for potentially improving RMT. I can't thank Dmsc enough for that!The second step was converting the 6502 player to a higher level language (C#) and that became RMT2LZSS. This was useful for automatically converting tunes to RAW pokey streams (instead of playing them in Altirra and saving it to SAPR manually) and compressing them with LZSS.
For those who aren't aware, I used it for "Prince of Persia" for tunes and sfx. I'd have gone mad if I'd had to convert them manually with Altirra every time I got a new revision of the sounds!I made a 1st attempt in C# using Winforms (and ASAP for playback) which turned out to be a gigantic pain... Winforms can help you design complicated UIs quite easily as long as you don't need anything uncommon... if you call listview field editing uncommon! It was horribly slow too... So I put it on the side for a while.
Recently, I started fresh and I figured that if I was going to build a tracker it needed to use Altirra's Pokey emulator... and since using C++ was out of question, I converted it to C# which was a lot more complicated than I anticipated. Unfortunately I cut off a little but too much code and removed 2Tone support.
For the GUI, @ggn once suggested that I use "Dear ImGui", which despite being lower level than Winforms, turned out to be an great suggestion!
So I cobbled together Altirra Pokey and my C# RMT player with DImGui and the result is: Deluxe RMT (DxRMT).
It's not quite ready though given that no tune has ever been composed with it and I'm surely not going to get into music composing so I'd like to get it into the hands of people with better musical abilities than mine.
There's not going to be any public release yet because the code contains Phaeron's Pokey code converted to C#, its license means that any derived code should be released too which is totally fair. What bugs me is that I don't foresee much interest in the project and unless I'm proven wrong I may not even bother updating it any further nor make a public release.
For now I'll just send it to those I know have musical abilities but if you're a musician I'm not familiar with, you could just PM me.
Features:
- file format is plain text
- per channel/per line effects support (just like Amiga soundtrackers)
- some protrackers effects implemented
- extended instruments support (custom note tables, longer envelopes...)
- RMT 1.28/1.28 patch 6&8 compatibility with added protracker effects and extended instrument support, and (crap quality) samples.
- Supports my experimental custom tables patch (originally implemented in RMT2LZSS). Allows for many more distortion settings than RMT, 16 bit interpolation.
- .MOD import (still requires extra manual work of course but should be easier thanks to effects being supported)
- 1x/2x/3x/4x/8x/16x instruments update per frame (800Hz in Pal)
- direct control of AUDCTL
- Altirra Pokey for output
- powerful interface thanks to DImGui
- WAV export
- 4K screen support
There's no Stereo support, it's 90% there but I can't be bothered...
No NTSC support either yet although that's probably 99% there.
Side note: RMT2LZSS still exists because it didn't really make sense to include it in the tracker itself but it's now called DxRMTConverter and supports the new DxRMT format of course (it still is a Winform App).
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It looks very good, I was wondering what it looks like on the ZX and Amiga so I turned to YT. No luck but I found a real life Tony Montezuma!
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17 hours ago, kiwilove said:
I do wonder what your next game project will be? Or other ones further down the line. There is one particular game I like to see fully done, but won't mention the title here. It's probably on a lot of players' most wanted list - and is known to be doable now.
If you're talking about Playsoft's excellent Gloogloo demo, I looked at a possible conversion and I haven't actually ruled it out 🙂
It would be a great showcase for the A8. One potential problem is the original board' specs:
2 Z80s clocked at 6MHz (not counting the one driving the soundchip). The 2nd one being dedicated to the enemy movements and collision detection.
The graphics chip being able to display 64 sprites and a background.
The good news is that the hardware is underused.
Regarding CPU usage, There's a NES version which runs fine on the 6502 (although it's simpler than the arcade).
For the graphics chip, although a lot of sprites are displayed, only a portion require proper sprite code. The chip's background feature is hardly used (only the various texts and beam capture feature)
For a faithful conversion, formation expansion is a must unlike the NES version and Playsoft's demo. This would show off the A8's versatility over the technically superior NES. No 8bit version does this.
The main problem is the amount of Z80 code to convert 🤔 Although there are disassembled versions and even slightly more readable C version.
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17 hours ago, slx said:
it is somehow very satisfying to see that those ports were not missing due to insufficient hardware.
That was a goal of mine.
To be honest, I doubt it would have been possible to get near the same quality back then. The development environment is just that much better. Something as simple as the code for optimizing sprite space would have been a difficult to run on even on an AtariST. The compression algorithms (ZX0, ZX5, LZSS) didn't even exist ! And obviously working with Altirra gives you access to all the A8 internals while you'd have been facing a blank screen for the hundreds of encountered bugs on a real A8.
Still quite satisfying though!
10 hours ago, Mclaneinc said:Thank you Rensoup and all the hard work by the crew, the graphics get a special mention for the animation quality and well as the game mechanics. Music wise, it's perfect..
Thanks everybody for the support.
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11 hours ago, ZuluGula said:
In United States of America we have "innocent until proven guilty", and it's the job of accuser to prove that someone is guilty, not the other way around.
I don't have the inclination to go US entrapment style and contact him, pay him money for a game that I worked on, wait for a week for it to arrive and post a picture.
He "delated" the game wanting no association with yet he's keeping the video online.
As he reminded us he posted a rapidus video with a link to his store:
At the time, I replied that he could really show off the power of rapidus by disabling the frame limiter in the PoP menu which he never followed up on.
Retrospectively, I understand that he didn't really give a shit and was just promoting his store.
I just looked at his short posting history too and a good chunk of it is dedicated to that same purpose.
So much bullshit while all I wanted was that post (which I reported twice) to be taken down. It's still up. Such are my superpowers...
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On 8/16/2021 at 2:26 PM, zbyti said:
I think it will be weak blackmail
But one more post not related to PoP and I am leaving this forum 
On 11/21/2022 at 12:43 AM, zbyti said:I'm off.
14 hours ago, zbyti said:ok, I've decided, I'm leaving this forum.
TO BE CONTINUED...
(100% guaranteed)
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14 hours ago, zbyti said:
I'm still not convinced that the auction you mentioned took place,
I'm still convinced that I saw that auction the first time I clicked on that link but not the subsequent times but maybe I'm going senile.
As far as I'm concerned that comparison video is still a sales pitch for PoP carts.The fact is: he has sold dozens of "blank" carts and this is posted at the bottom of each auction:
QuoteOn special request, I can design backups for other game titles. Please contact me in this matter. You can watch my games being backed up. I have all of them in the original version (they do not constitute an auction offer).
Video is still up btw.
14 hours ago, zbyti said:and the fact that you are vulgar and called me a douche not help to trust your words, but you are allowed to do more here and that is a fact.
You consider that because of this project I'm allowed the extra privilege of insulting whoever I want but here's my point of view:
1.This project went on for about two and a half years. It was released for free.
2.This guy is selling "blank" carts.
On 11/19/2022 at 9:50 PM, zbyti said:I'm not on anyone's side, both are breaking the law only one way seems to be acceptable and the other way is not.
The amazing thing is that you don't understand how insulting a statement that is.
On 11/20/2022 at 1:15 AM, zbyti said:Look! you got special privileges too, that is a fact.
Best of all: this discussion is a complete waste of time which I could have avoided by not making a cart version at all.
Live and learn 🙄
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On 11/20/2022 at 11:07 PM, nowy80 said:
Now I have a bad association with this release, so I delated my private cartridge. I only have the version I made for the C64 and the original for the Amiga.
Such a radical move...
I guess the association isn't bad enough to go as far as removing the promotional video🙄
19 hours ago, nowy80 said:I'm still waiting for information "rensoup" what I stole from you. You have made unsubstantiated allegations and criminal threats.
We already know that you can't possibly be stealing something that is available for free, and as others have tried to explain to you: It's still a major dick move.
Legal threats don't make you credible, It's just more dick moves.
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3 hours ago, zbyti said:
what you think it is is one thing and what it really is is another. @nowy80 give us a photo please what we really seen.
Here you go:
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Here's a cut of that video, no point wasting too much server space for this:
Notice that he has manuals and posters for both the C64 and A8 versions... I guess you can never have too many posters for your personal use.
He seems to throw in some business cart too just in case he wants to do business with himself again?
Then he adds a caption saying A8 & C64 carts are available on his ebid/ebay profile.
Then he proceeds to show a dustcover with a caption saying it's available on his ebid/ebay profile.
You're going to tell me he's selling draconus/bruceLee/Karateka/... carts while showing PoP carts?
He also sells 128KB Karateka carts. I guess those were never available originally and were created by A8 community members ( just like most carts he's selling ? ) so that would be profiting from the work others have released for free.
I don't care what amount people ask for -actual- blank carts, they could ask $1000000, it's their business.
Like I said earlier, the fact remains that nobody would buy $65 "blank" A8 PoP carts had there been no A8 PoP version.
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1 hour ago, zbyti said:
At this point is your word as an eyewitness against his.
So you're saying I'd be lying for what reason exactly ?
2 hours ago, zbyti said:someone is lying here... if it's the @nowy80 it actually deserves to be "banned". I took his statement as true. I'm not and wasn't interested in his goods, so I did not check his auctions then, now I can't find them.
I have never seen you as active on this topic... and you defended him without even seeking the facts ?
44 minutes ago, zbyti said:9 feedback's for "blank", no PoP, business prosperous as hell
I tried everything I could to help him though 🙄
Great detective skills too. Did it perhaps occur to you to watch the video ?
Don't worry I saved it, just in case he deletes it too... I'm sure I can count on you for a screencap and an apology.
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31 minutes ago, zbyti said:
If you seen this I was wrong, just admit you seen this auction.
I'm guessing you know the guy personally to defend him so blindly, so you probably already know that he took the auction down.
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4 minutes ago, zbyti said:
guess so? you are too childish for my standards... I my admire your work and dedication but as a person you are a BUG in code of life
Great, you the man now let's all go enjoy our man child hobby...
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6 minutes ago, zbyti said:
I will insult people who lie to my face and act offended when exposed because there's no point arguing rationally with someone who has tried and tested some pseudo argument sinkhole which you know will drag on forever.
Had there been no A8 version he wouldn't be selling "blank" A8 carts.
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1 hour ago, CharlieChaplin said:
That's why I asked if rensoup had an agreement with JM and Ubisoft to port POP to the A8.
(Ubisoft owns the POP videogame franchise) If not, we are all thieves.
Some things are acceptable, others aren't, see JM's twitter's comment. That's not approval but he certainly didn't sound pissed off. Not sure he'd feel the same if someone tweeted him a link to "blank" PoP carts sold on ebay.
1 hour ago, zbyti said:Bunch of lies... There's no point being rational with that kind of crap but I'll just give some context to @Albert
That clown printed Superrune's original PoP pic for the A8 on a label, stuck it on a cart and pretended to sell those blank carts in VHS boxes with some old PoP artwork.
He posted a link to some bullshit video compare of the C64 vs A8 versions. Clearly appearing very familiar with the subject by mentioning the C64 version was released in 1990 🙄
Links in the description video pointed to "empty" PoP blank carts for sale.
1 hour ago, ivop said:But along the way he coded a LOT of new code himself to make it all work the way it does. People did new graphics, new music, et cetera.
Like I mentioned before I mainly started from the BBC version because it was buildable without any fuss unlike the A2 version.
I also wrongly assumed that the screen format being similar to the BBC would also make it easier. In reality, it's exactly the same except for a single instruction to convert from A2 to BBC/A8.
That's just to say again that there's probably no code left from the BBC, except perhaps for some potential improvements that Kieran may have made, I don't know if there are any though.
TIX, redrew all the animations and will probably hate me foverer for that. Miker, Vinscool, Emkay did the music and sound effects and Superrune did the great intro picture. So there's a lot of stuff that was recreated just for this version which made it stand out.
Then there's code from several other A8 members here: Dmsc, xxl, elmer for sound/ disk / compression.
35 minutes ago, invisible kid said:Definitely don't release the source code if you haven't already.
Well, that's one reason why I didn't.
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2 hours ago, zbyti said:
no one sold a PoP cartridge here.
I'm not on anyone's side, both are breaking the law only one way seems to be acceptable and the other way is not.
Damn, you're a douche...
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17 hours ago, nowy80 said:
Could you justify your subsequent invectives? What do you think I stole from you? I'm just asking for arguments, not invectives like so far. If you insult me again, I will not post in this thread again. Just note that I didn't write any emotional sentence directly about you.
I don't understand what you're complaining about, I did you a favour by promoting your business which you said worked brilliantly the first time.
I'm just honestly and respectfully trying to help an irrational scumbag legally earn free money, what's wrong with that ?
So ungrateful!
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But one more post not related to PoP and I am leaving this forum 
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Logiker's Vintage Computing Christmas Challenge 2022
in Atari 8-Bit Computers
Posted
Cool, any chance that you could post the init code (not the challenge code) ? I'm guessing you don't have any graphics setup code and just rely on the A8 booting into gr0 ?