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Ideas for new Intellivision Synthesizer game (melody blaster)


Rev

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I think Freewheel was working on something, but a better question would be how many of the collectors here have the music synthesizer? not to mention programmers..

 

And of those, which ones would dare to pull them off their shelves.

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I think a game would have to be synth-enhanced at best. Far too few of us have one. A "piano hero" that required both hand controllers (100% of potential players) or ECS keyboard (5%) or synth keyboard (1%) would work out. Hmmm I think an ECS would be mandatory since that opens up possibilities due to the second AY chip.

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OK, given all the synth keyboard kerfuffle, I'm going to do what I never do at state what I'm working on before it is complete.

 

It is early days and obviously it is not a game, but I'm for the last month I've been playing with making the ECS into the best synthesizer I can. Primarily this is to see if Mattel could have competed in the low end synth market in the early 80s. I did toy with modelling an analog synth, but I don't think the CP1610 is fast enough to do anything interesting. So we are probably stuck with square waves. I'm looking to do independent pitch and volume envelopes for each voice, linked voices into instruments with delay to give limited reverb, echo and arpeggios; portamento and pitch bend. 1-6 note polyphony depending on how voices are linked, optional split keyboard and a simple retro styled GUI with saving of settings.

 

Here is a current work in progress with some GUI ideas. It is based on Joe's synth scanning code and note table. This has hard coded pitch and volume envelopes on 2 voices but allows control of attack rate on one of them with the disk.

 

post-46336-0-38778500-1489389443_thumb.png

synth.rom

 

If you are using this on an emulator you will need to configure up the keyboard to something sensible. The following hack file will give the ECS the majority of the PC keyboard, low notes on the bottom row, high on the top (qwerty assumed); and the up and down arrows to the attack control.

 

kbdhack.txt

 

As I said this is preliminary work and it might come to nothing if it does not turn into something interesting. Oh and if anyone is interested I have a patch for the Linux version of Jzintv that hacks in MIDI input.

 

 

Cheers

 

decle

 

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Interesting. How do I set up on intv?

 

Hi Rev

 

To test the ROM in Jzintv use the following command:

 

jzintv --kbdhackfile=kbdhack.txt -s1 -z1 synth.rom

 

To try it on real hardware, use an LTO Flash or CC3 to play the ROM and connect an ECS & Synth. The kbdhack.txt file should be redundant. I think it should work. That said, it has not been tested on a real Inty. If it doesn't I'd be interested to know what it does. Either way prepare to be underwhelmed.

 

 

Thanks

 

decle

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If you dont have an ECS piano keyboard but have a midi keyboard you might be able to use it with emulation (midi mapped to keyboard).

 

Unfortunately this does not seem to work, at least on Linux, because SDL reads the keyboard at a rather low level and the MIDI mapper I tried (midi2key) injects keystrokes to X11. This is why I hacked MIDI input directly into Jzintv. On another O/S your mileage may be different.

 

decle

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No, but I think Decle might be saying that with his modified jzintv.

 

This is correct. In general I don't believe you can directly use MIDI as an input to Jzintv. However, I have a cobbled together hack for the Linux version that allows this. I needed it because I develop using Jzintv and I wanted to have synth input. It is a means to an end and so it is the minimum that works for me. Unfortunately, I don't think this patch will work on other operating systems as it piggybacks on the MIDI support in the Linux ALSA sound libraries.

 

As you suggest, it may be possible to use a MIDI to keyboard mapper on Windows or OSX to achieve the same result. I had completely forgotten about using a joypad to keyboard mapper for Jzintv, it has been a long time since I used Windows for gaming. All the Linux patch does is listen for MIDI events generated by ALSA, convert them in SDL keyboard events and inject them into the SDL event queue. From here they are read and acted upon by Jzintv as normal. So the patch is also acting as MIDI to keyboard mapper, only one that happens to be built into Jzintv. :)

 

 

decle

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  • 2 weeks later...

I think Freewheel was working on something, but a better question would be how many of the collectors here have the music synthesizer? not to mention programmers..

 

Yeah, I whipped up a rudimentary synthesizer program that lets you modify a whole bunch of settings via a very arcane control/display scheme. It uses almost every input on both hand controllers to do different things. I've had a lot of fun mucking about with it but it's incredibly unwieldy. I'm not a music guy at heart so I'm not sure if I'm even using the right terminology. It does make some pretty neat sound effects though.

 

I wanted to get it so that you could save "instruments" and patterns and such, maybe split the keyboard to do 2 instruments at once, that kind of thing. Just ran out of steam thanks to Desert Bus. And I expect the market would be extremely small for something like this.

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  • 1 year later...

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