Pokey Music & Touch Tablet

Clint Thompson · November 30, 2007

Please feel free to discard the following idea as completely looney.... with that in mind:

With all the talk about polycounter resets on the pokey, how much I love the sound it generates.... my idea on what I've been wanting to do with the 800 musically lately and looking up mini synths online brought me to this idea. I was thinking about how hard it would be to hand program certain things in (or at least time consuming wise) on the 800 for music and fx.... and what a waste right? Couldn't someone program the Atari Touch Tablet to respond/feedback certain frequencies to whatever is playing on the pokey in real time? *(I say someone because I know shit about programming above basic.... although I guess I could try and tinker around with basic and the sound thing somehow for oddball music output)

In short, I guess if you've ever seen the V-Synth you 'kinda-sorta' know what I'm talking about. Maybe a real-time effects or flanging/flanger pad of some sort.... so when the touch pad feeds back position x-30, y120 and you quickly slide over and up to x-200, y10, it'll jazz up the tone or whatever very very fastly? or change the sounds/noises quickly also in conjunction with holding one of the buttons down? (mind you, I have no idea how many x's and y's there are on the Touch Tablet... but I'm assuming a decent/useable number)

Then the thought of printing a transparent overlay for the top of the touch pad with a keyboard (aka poor man's Atari Hotz Box) came to mind as well. Maybe something like this has already been tried and done and I've just been living under a large rock but the idea seems probable and possibly useful to someone aside from myself, yes?

Eh ,maybe it sounds strange....

Edited November 30, 2007 by Clint Thompson

Rybags · November 30, 2007

As I understand it, the touch tablet is essentially a pair of paddles, giving X and Y on each ones input.

So, I'd guess it's input values go from 1 to 228, since that's as much as POKEY can support.

Still, a good idea, however I understand that many people now just use PC software to create Atari music (even though the emulation of POKEY is nowhere near complete).