Search found 114 matches

by utz
Thu Mar 28, 2024 2:45 pm
Forum: Music
Topic: ZX Spectrum 48 beeper music colection
Replies: 9
Views: 432

Re: ZX Spectrum 48 beeper music colection

Glad you're having fun with octode2k16! Those conversions are great. You're one of the very few people using that engine, actually. To answer some questions: Yes, the sound on actual hardware is more raspy. The "unfiltered" option in Fuse provides a fairly accurate rendition of how it will...
by utz
Sun Feb 25, 2024 1:11 am
Forum: Showcase your work!
Topic: New beeper engines: Ulasyn and PhaserF
Replies: 15
Views: 655

Re: New beeper engines: Ulasyn and PhaserF

Does the music stops if a key/fire button has pressed? Because I am not going to put any engines in my games now if they don't stop using fire. (Or maybe I should just use AY engines instead.) Yes, both engines check for Kempston and will exit on any key and fire. However, keyboard checks are only ...
by utz
Tue Feb 13, 2024 11:27 am
Forum: Showcase your work!
Topic: New beeper engines: Ulasyn and PhaserF
Replies: 15
Views: 655

Re: New beeper engines: Ulasyn and PhaserF

From the tests Yerzmyey and me ran back then on several machines, this seems to be not the case. The combination of pin pulses on beeper + AY drums like with Follin's engine sort of works, since it doesn't matter so much how loud the drums are, as long as they're somewhat audible. Anything more comp...
by utz
Mon Feb 12, 2024 10:07 pm
Forum: Showcase your work!
Topic: New beeper engines: Ulasyn and PhaserF
Replies: 15
Views: 655

Re: New beeper engines: Ulasyn and PhaserF

I actually made a combined beeper/AY engine once. The problem is that there is a strong volume imbalance between these two audio sources. And exactly how big of a difference varies wildly between models and even different board versions of the same model. On top of it, most emulators do the sensible...
by utz
Mon Feb 12, 2024 6:05 pm
Forum: Showcase your work!
Topic: New beeper engines: Ulasyn and PhaserF
Replies: 15
Views: 655

Re: New beeper engines: Ulasyn and PhaserF

Hehe, thanks. 1. The engines are compatible with all models. On models that don't contend I/O, sound would probably be a bit cleaner. In any case, the above renders are from a standard 48k. 2. They each take 3333 bytes when aligned to a 256-byte border. Some light-weight compression is used for the ...
by utz
Mon Feb 12, 2024 3:29 pm
Forum: Showcase your work!
Topic: New beeper engines: Ulasyn and PhaserF
Replies: 15
Views: 655

New beeper engines: Ulasyn and PhaserF

I recently made two new music routines for the ZX Spectrum Beeper. Ulasyn features 2 pulse wave channels with lo-pass/hi-pass filters with variable cutoff, variable duty cycle, duty cycle sweep, noise mode, and an interrupting PWM sample channel with variable pitch and volume. https://www.youtube.co...
by utz
Tue Oct 10, 2023 10:16 pm
Forum: Programming
Topic: Idea for x-platform language
Replies: 15
Views: 416

Re: Idea for x-platform language

mumble muble Turbo Rascal muble mumble...
by utz
Sat Aug 19, 2023 11:21 pm
Forum: Music
Topic: BEEPOLA: Exiting after every note
Replies: 14
Views: 466

Re: BEEPOLA: Exiting after every note

Bubu wrote: Fri Aug 18, 2023 5:04 pm Hi, @utz , I've been googling that but can't find any difference between the Tritone engine included in Beepola, and those in z88dk.
My bad, I thought they had a modified version that can be called note-by-note, but apparently that's not the case.
by utz
Fri Aug 18, 2023 11:16 am
Forum: Music
Topic: BEEPOLA: Exiting after every note
Replies: 14
Views: 466

Re: BEEPOLA: Exiting after every note

Have a look at the modified Tritone player in z88dk.
by utz
Mon Jun 06, 2022 9:41 am
Forum: Music
Topic: God Save the Queen in BEEPER?
Replies: 9
Views: 574

Re: God Save the Queen in BEEPER?

Not sure if that's what you had in mind, but this does satisfy the requirements I believe:

by utz
Mon Mar 07, 2022 12:18 am
Forum: Programming
Topic: TR-DOS virtual fs for Midnight Commander
Replies: 1
Views: 153

Re: TR-DOS virtual fs for Midnight Commander

Found it! However, seems it's quite basic, actually. Might try to code up a replacement if I can find some free time. Anyway, in case somebody has a use for this, here's the code. Iirc it was originally posted on zx-pk.ru. It requires mctrd . #!/bin/bash MCTRD=mctrd umask 077 cmd="$1" # su...
by utz
Sun Mar 06, 2022 12:55 am
Forum: Programming
Topic: TR-DOS virtual fs for Midnight Commander
Replies: 1
Views: 153

TR-DOS virtual fs for Midnight Commander

I used to be able to view and edit .trd and .scl files with Midnight Commander (and also .tap, if memory serves correctly). Unfortunately, when I reinstalled my system a while back, I apparently forgot to copy over the required .trd extfs thingy - and now I'm unable to find it anywhere. Perhaps a ki...
by utz
Mon Feb 21, 2022 10:52 am
Forum: Showcase your work!
Topic: Specasm: A Z80 assembler designed to run on the spectrum itself
Replies: 30
Views: 2716

Re: Specasm: A Z80 assembler designed to run on the spectrum itself

Awesome project, looks like this could be a worthy successor to MRS . I've been hoping for something like this that makes use of ESXDOS for a long time. Skimming through the documentation, I had a couple of thoughts. Expressions It would be great if this gets extended a bit in the long run. If I und...
by utz
Mon Feb 14, 2022 11:00 pm
Forum: Programming
Topic: Fastest way to do a little BEEP
Replies: 28
Views: 1154

Re: Fastest way to do a little BEEP

Hahaha, the whole time I was typing this up I was thinking "Uh oh, introspec better not read this" :mrgreen: Ultimately it's all down to subjective experience. Objectively speaking 8t aligned engines are of course going to sound cleaner , but whether that's always better is a matter of per...
by utz
Mon Feb 14, 2022 9:20 pm
Forum: Programming
Topic: Fastest way to do a little BEEP
Replies: 28
Views: 1154

Re: Fastest way to do a little BEEP

So a multi-channel sound routine or one that tries to juggle the speaker state as a form of volume control MUST repeat at a multiple of 8 clock cycles, so that it can align with the pattern of memory contention... Actually, my takeaway from years of experimentation is that this is rather debatable....
by utz
Sat Feb 12, 2022 11:40 am
Forum: Programming
Topic: Fastest way to do a little BEEP
Replies: 28
Views: 1154

Re: Fastest way to do a little BEEP

Slightly faster, but more registers used:

Code: Select all

  ld de,#80        ; tone freq, lower value = lower tone
  ld bc,#1000      ; length
loop:
  add hl,de
  ld a,h
  and #10          ; optional, masks border colour
  out (#fe),a
  dec bc
  ld a,b
  or c
  jr nz,loop
by utz
Thu Sep 16, 2021 8:18 pm
Forum: Music
Topic: Best samples for digitised speech
Replies: 5
Views: 455

Re: Best samples for digitised speech

In addition to what PROSM wrote, you can also try to overdrive the sample slightly, ie. amplify it so it clips a bit (Audacity will let you know how much your sample clips when amplifying, going 6-8 dB over the limit usually gives good results). Also, applying a low-pass filter with a cut-off slight...
by utz
Sun Mar 21, 2021 2:59 pm
Forum: Programming
Topic: Pseudorandom number generator
Replies: 23
Views: 1892

Re: Pseudorandom number generator

Wooooo Xeda! Good to see you're still going strong on TI and Z80. I'm curious about that 5 channel sound routine, do you have a link to that? If you just want a cheapo PRNG to generate noise, you can go even faster: ld de,$2157 next_num add hl,de rlc h inc h ; optional, improves quality ld a,h Thoug...
by utz
Sun Mar 14, 2021 8:10 pm
Forum: Programming
Topic: A new data compressor called ZX0
Replies: 280
Views: 20009

Re: A new data compressor called ZX0

Am I understanding correctly that the 6502 depacker is not compatible with output from the original compressor?
by utz
Sun Mar 07, 2021 6:46 pm
Forum: Programming
Topic: Why can I hear this?
Replies: 9
Views: 569

Re: Why can I hear this?

The main reason for the parasite tone here will probably be the fact that this loop is not timing-stable, because of IO contention. Aligning the output to a multiple of 8 t-states should improve the result somewhat, but there will still be whine. di xor a ld bc,0x10fe ld hl,loop loop: xor b ;4 out (...
by utz
Tue Feb 16, 2021 10:38 pm
Forum: Programming
Topic: Adding music to a program
Replies: 19
Views: 662

Re: Adding music to a program

P.S. It’s not a good idea to concatenate TAP files, because aside from actual data, they contain additional information relevant to the container itself. You’ll end up with a bunch of garbage at the “joint” of the files. Is that really true? The .tap format is pretty much made to facilitate concate...
by utz
Tue Feb 09, 2021 10:23 am
Forum: Music
Topic: Sample to BEEP in the olden days
Replies: 21
Views: 1534

Re: Sample to BEEP in the olden days

Do you have an example of that? I know [mention]RMartins[/mention] tried a couple of years ago, and it was just barely working (for mixing two channels). It's unfeasible for two reasons, first of all because it takes too much memory, and second of all because the Speccy is barely fast enough for the...
by utz
Mon Feb 08, 2021 11:20 pm
Forum: Music
Topic: Sample to BEEP in the olden days
Replies: 21
Views: 1534

Re: Sample to BEEP in the olden days

This is interesting: http://www.robeesworld.com/blog/58/pulse-width-modulation-how-1-bit-music-works It shows how a sine wave can be cut up into varying hi/lo cycles at a fixed rate (Pulse Width Modulation). For replay, this relies on the smoothed response of the speaker circuit. Is there a similar...
by utz
Sun Feb 07, 2021 8:34 pm
Forum: Music
Topic: Sample to BEEP in the olden days
Replies: 21
Views: 1534

Re: Sample to BEEP in the olden days

A third method is open to you if you have other processing hardware. You convert the sound into a very fast stream of dithered bits that rely on the resistor/capacitor circuit of the Speccy's speaker to smooth them out into an audio waveform. Though I've never seen any software that can generate th...
by utz
Tue Jan 19, 2021 4:23 pm
Forum: Programming
Topic: A new data compressor called ZX0
Replies: 280
Views: 20009

Re: A new data compressor called ZX0

Fantastic work, thanks a lot Einar! Running a few tests shows that ZX0 works very well for my most common use case, compressing data for music players. Very exited to see something that can beat apack.