Music in 2600 Games

[kisrael]

"Moon Patrol" was one of my favorite tunes to "jam" to during highschool marching band...great little riff

[Alex H]

By all accounts the 2600's chip was alot better than most other 'sound' chips around at the time (and later - the 48k Spectrum - ugh!)

 

So if the TIA was "by all accounts" better than the sound chip of the spectrum, why did Atari use the speccys chip for the Atari ST instead of its own "superior" TIA?

900398[/snapback]

 

The 48k Spectrum didn't even have a sound chip. It had a single I/O line connected to the speaker which was twiddled under CPU control. The Atari ST used the Yamaha version of the Intellivision (GI) sound chip. (The later 128K Spectrums used the GI sound chip, as did the Vectrex, MSX and others.)

 

The TIA has more waveforms than the GI chip so is more flexible in the type of sounds it can make, but only has 2 channels and 8-bit pitch control. The GI sound chip has 3 square-wave oscillators with 12-bit pitch control which makes it more tuneful, plus a noise generator and envelope generator which can also be used as a triangle/sawtooth oscillator.

Edited July 28, 2005 by Alex H

[Cybergoth]

Hi there!

 

The 48k Spectrum didn't even have a sound chip.  It had a single I/O line connected to the speaker which was twiddled under CPU control.  The Atari ST used the Yamaha version of the Intellivision (GI) sound chip.  (The later 128K Spectrums used the GI sound chip, as did the Vectrex, MSX and others.)

 

Interesting. I thought all speccys had it

 

Greetings,

Manuel

[NE146]

"Moon Patrol" was one of my favorite tunes to "jam" to during highschool marching band...great little riff

 

Listen to any of Hendrix's versions of "Killing Floor". That'll make you jam And of course I say this because the riff is pretty much almost identical to Moon Patrol

[supercat]

The TIA has more waveforms than the GI chip so is more flexible in the type of sounds it can make, but only has 2 channels and 8-bit pitch control.

900419[/snapback]

 

It has FIVE-bit pitch control. And most of the different timbres have different divide-down ratios, which means they give different sets of pitches available. If the TIA had five-bit pitch control or even if it had a programmable divide-by-1/2/4/8 prescalar, I'd consider it "very capable" of producing music, compared with other machines of the era. But 5-bit pitch control is nasty.

[Alex H]

It has FIVE-bit pitch control.

Yes, what was I thinking? And I was programming sound just an hour before writing that.

 

But 5-bit pitch control is nasty.

Yep.

 

I think the main reasons there isn't much in-game music on the 2600 is because it only has 2 channels, and developers wouldn't want to use up valuable ROM space on music that sounds nasty.

[kisrael]

On a related note (no pun intended) I just ported my old JoustPong music engine to Batari BASIC:

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=73607&hl=

That's probably the simplest way of experimenting with various sound effects, since for most of us it's easier to code the logic in the BASIC-like control structures than in raw Assembly.

[Room 34]

"Moon Patrol" was one of my favorite tunes to "jam" to during highschool marching band...great little riff

 

Listen to any of Hendrix's versions of "Killing Floor". That'll make you jam And of course I say this because the riff is pretty much almost identical to Moon Patrol

900448[/snapback]

Well... it's a 12-bar blues with a walking bass line, so naturally it'll sound like Moon Patrol and about 85% of all of the other blues songs out there!

 

(BTW, I used to LOVE jamming to the Moon Patrol music as well... in fact I stole the Moon Patrol riff 100% as my bass line in an "original" song when I was playing in a blues-rock band a few years ago.)

[The_Laird]

Hi there!

 

The 48k Spectrum didn't even have a sound chip.  It had a single I/O line connected to the speaker which was twiddled under CPU control.  The Atari ST used the Yamaha version of the Intellivision (GI) sound chip.  (The later 128K Spectrums used the GI sound chip, as did the Vectrex, MSX and others.)

 

Interesting. I thought all speccys had it

 

Greetings,

Manuel

900420[/snapback]

 

Exactly what I was refering to. The 128k Speccy had an excellent sound chip, certainly the best around at the time, all the games that took advantage had superb music and often speech too. The 48k Speccy's sound sucked. It was cool how you could write programs that did a check which version of the Spectrum you had and add things to the game accordingly. Music, superior sound and single loads on the 128K and Ram Disk storage on the +2a and +3.