Pro Sound Development Tool

[Joe Musashi]

This is probably not really useful, but it may be fun for those who would want a more nostalgic feel to 2600 development.

 

As you may know the Atari 7800 contains a TIA for backwards compatibillity, but also for sound generation. There is an "official"

7800 development system

, which runs on an Atari ST. Apart from various other utilities, it contains a sound development tool, which can also be used to design sounds for the 2600:

 

 

The pro sound tool runs nicely in an ST emulator. With F9 and F10 one can add new notes and then use the mouse to edit frequency, volume and control. What might be interesting is the ability to draw curves.

 

Notes can be exported as an .S assembler file which should be easy to include in any player code.

PROSOUND.S

[Mr SQL]

This looks really cool Joe, particularly drawing curves! Looking a the copyright date it seems part of the advanced kit Atari came out with in the late 80's like the Macro Assembler Tom had pointed out; I wonder what later games utilised advanced tools like these - I was thinking maybe Solaris but it's too early, '86.

[Sprybug]

Oh yes! I could have used this when I did the soundtrack for Princess Rescue. It was very time consuming figuring out with the keyboard in VBB and then taking that data and including it in my program. I'm not going to have an in game soundtrack for Zippy but I will have sound effects, along with music for the title screen and this will help a lot with generating that.

[Joe Musashi]

I should have mentioned that the ST app does not generate sounds by itself. There's supposed to be a physical link between the ST and the 7800, which then plays everything back. So without the development hardware you would still have to export and include the data by hand to hear how it sounds.