Xuel Posted August 4, 2023 Share Posted August 4, 2023 Check out this awesome new 2600 music tracker by Aleksi Eeben: The "Star Bars Atari 2600 Music Competition" is open till Aug 15 for anyone who wants to try their hand at making some tunes using this new tracker technology: https://csdb.dk/event/?id=3323 Website: https://bit.ly/atari2600starbars Youtube: Cheers, Xuel 9 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
4ever2600 Posted August 7, 2023 Share Posted August 7, 2023 That's amazing! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Stephen Posted August 8, 2023 Share Posted August 8, 2023 Wonder if the tracker could be used (or extended) for PoKey? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TrekMD Posted August 8, 2023 Share Posted August 8, 2023 Wow, those are awesome! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rom Hunter Posted August 8, 2023 Share Posted August 8, 2023 Incredible. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bomberman94 Posted August 8, 2023 Share Posted August 8, 2023 Wow fantastic sounds! What comes to mind spontaneously: The music of „Tie Tycoon“ would fit very well with the game ‚Blinky goes up‘ 😅 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Jentzsch Posted August 8, 2023 Share Posted August 8, 2023 This is nice. And sounds great. Too bad it cannot be used easily within 2600 games due to the "Tiatonic Tuning" and the very frequent register updates. BTW: Is there are detailed documentation of TiaTonic Tuning somewhere? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xuel Posted August 8, 2023 Author Share Posted August 8, 2023 3 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said: This is nice. And sounds great. Too bad it cannot be used easily within 2600 games due to the "Tiatonic Tuning" and the very frequent register updates. BTW: Is there are detailed documentation of TiaTonic Tuning somewhere? The description on third Youtube video, "Tiatonic Tuning for Atari 2600" has a link to a dropbox folder with assembly source code and a PDF with a bit more detail: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/1ue30pcjup1zbbr/AADNfPVhQOa4UbwxRj2JoGAxa?dl=0 Looks like each pitch has three bytes of information associated with it: 1) Dominant AUDF setting 2) 8-bit pattern for how often to switch to AUDF setting+1 3) AUDC setting Seems like the main innovation here is quickly twiddling AUDF between two consecutive values, in the correct proportion, to achieve the desired frequency when averaged over many updates. Encoding the proportion as an 8-bit mask that you rotate every update is very clever! If you build the demo code, you can tradeoff tuning accuracy for lower update frequency by changing the QUALITY setting in tiatonic.s: QUALITY equ $07 ; $03 = high, $07 = good, $0f = average, $1f = low, $3f = bad Those correspond to updates every 4, 8, 16, 32 or 64 scan lines. You can also completely disable the AUDF twiddling by holding down fire on joystick 1. Cheers, Xuel Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Jentzsch Posted August 8, 2023 Share Posted August 8, 2023 8 minutes ago, Xuel said: Seems like the main innovation here is quickly twiddling AUDF between two consecutive values, in the correct proportion, to achieve the desired frequency when averaged over many updates. That's the same I did for the siren in Star Castle Arcade. 8 minutes ago, Xuel said: Encoding the proportion as an 8-bit mask that you rotate every update is very clever! Indeed. 8 minutes ago, Xuel said: You can also completely disable the AUDF twiddling by holding down fire on joystick 1. That doesn't seem to work with the released demo ROMs. Too bad, it would be interesting to hear the difference. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Yurkie Posted August 8, 2023 Share Posted August 8, 2023 Could someone please explain what this is and if it can run on a real atari 2600? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xuel Posted August 9, 2023 Author Share Posted August 9, 2023 4 hours ago, Yurkie said: Could someone please explain what this is and if it can run on a real atari 2600? Yes, Aleksi Eeben wrote a music editor, Star Bars, for the Commodore 64 which produces Atari 2600 ROMs which you can then burn to a cart and play on a real Atari 2600. The demo ROMs Aleksi has put on Dropbox have the extension .a26. You can download and change the extension to .bin if that works better for your environment. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/8oqoeix1e0uritf/AAC-HWxtJqRQeaTh0ckNby4Ja/atari 2600?dl=0&subfolder_nav_tracking=1 https://www.dropbox.com/sh/1ue30pcjup1zbbr/AADNfPVhQOa4UbwxRj2JoGAxa?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/sh/1ue30pcjup1zbbr/AAC_fNKONuZLkclJPvh2-7caa/quality test?dl=0&subfolder_nav_tracking=1 Hopefully more people will use Star Bars to create more nice tunes for the A2600 and/or incorporate the playback routine into new A2600 games/demos so we can have more pleasant sounding music on the A2600. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moycon Posted August 9, 2023 Share Posted August 9, 2023 Wow. Totally amazing! Back when I had a working Vectrex there were a bunch of songs (Doctor Who theme, Star Wars theme, etc...) you could download and put on a multi cart and just play through your Vectrex. I did this often. It's fun to play games, but sometimes it's just as fun to kick back and marvel at the current technology for "ancient" video game systems. I love this! Thanks for sharing. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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