Making beautiful music

[+atari2600land]

How do you make songs in Batari Basic? Is there a lesson or thread for this yet, cuz I couldn't find any on this forum. I know how to read and write music if that helps. I can play the piano really good by ear, too.

[+batari]

How do you make songs in Batari Basic? Is there a lesson or thread for this yet, cuz I couldn't find any on this forum. I know how to read and write music if that helps. I can play the piano really good by ear, too.

http://www.alienbill.com/2600/basic/music/

[+atari2600land]

Do I really have to copy that whole program in order to play a song in my program?

[+Atarius Maximus]

Do I really have to copy that whole program in order to play a song in my program?

 

If you want to use that example then yes, you do. There may be other methods of incorporating music into bB programs, but for now it's the only example I know of. It works really well, although I've had a hard time modifying the song in my Jumper demo game. Making something that sounds good is going to take hours of work. I've earned a great deal of respect for all the atari audio programmers out there.

 

Steve

[+atari2600land]

I put the example code on that page in batari basic:

dim musicPointer=a
 dim musicTimer=b
 dim tempaudv=t

 rem VOLUME DOWN AND SET CHANNELS
 AUDV0=0
 AUDC0=6

 rem INITIALIZE POINTERS AND TIMERS
 musicPointer=$FF
 musicTimer=0

startLoop

 rem TIME TO UPDATE NOTE?
 if musicTimer = 0 then gosub changeMusicNote
 musicTimer = musicTimer - 1

 drawscreen
 goto startLoop

changeMusicNote
musicPointer = musicPointer + 1
AUDF0 = musicData[musicPointer]

tempaudv = 8
if musicData[musicPointer] = $FF then tempaudv = 0
AUDV0 = tempaudv

musicPointer = musicPointer + 1
musicTimer = musicData[musicPointer]
rem value is (2 * #_OF_NOTES) - 1
if musicPointer > 69 then musicPointer = #-1

 return

 data musicData
 24,30,27,30,30,30,27,30,24,28,-1,2,24,28,-1,2,24,60
 27,28,-1,2,27,28,-1,2,27,60,24,30,20,28,-1,2,20,60
 24,30,27,30,30,30,27,30,24,28,-1,2,24,28,-1,2,24,28,-1,2
 24,30,27,28,-1,2,27,30,24,30,27,30,30,120
end

compiled it, and it said it didn't know what musicPointer was!

[+batari]

I put the example code on that page in batari basic:

dim musicPointer=a

compiled it, and it said it didn't know what musicPointer was!

That's because the line above isn't properly indented.

[+atari2600land]

Now it doesn't know what musicData is. Geez, am I really this clueless?

[kisrael]

When you get this kind of error, use your editor to "find" the string in question and then see if it's there, see if it's indented properly, etc....

 

I wrote this music engine a longish while back. I think I didn't go further with it because someone pointed out that I could have saved a lot of ROM by use one byte to hold both note length and frequency, so I kind of got discouraged and didn't follow up on some of my grand ambitions for it

[kisrael]

Heh, wow, I had forgotten how much work I had put into that tutorial! It's actually not half bad if I do say so myself.

[vdub_bobby]

Making something that sounds good is going to take hours of work. I've earned a great deal of respect for all the atari audio programmers out there.

See some of the entries in my blog and Tommy's blog for some great helps.

 

And yes, it is a lot of work to get stuff that sounds good. Well, sometimes you stumble onto something simple that sounds great, but usually it takes a lot of work.