Spectrum Computing

Tis good, I miss the BOOM! That marks when the track really kicks off, too tricky to pull off?

It's a bit like Xecu....no, no it's not. Stop it.

Thought I'd post one of mine now
I didn't have time to make a new track from scratch, so I decided to take one of my old covers and polish it up a bit. This was one of my first AY tracks that I started back in March 2017, when this meme was still fresh. Trust me, it sounded a lot worse back then than it does now:

[media]https://youtu.be/jSd5vm6c5h8[/media]
Here's the .pt3 file just in case anyone wants to play around with it.

I didn't know the meme until 5 minutes ago but I love this track. The readbacks on that AY Tracker make it look like a demo in its own right.

Top stuff.

djnzx48 wrote: ↑Fri May 11, 2018 10:08 am Thought I'd post one of mine now

Nice! That was excellent timing too, as I didn't have time to do one myself this week.

This week I was actually working on a new track, but I thought it'd be better to leave it for another week as I didn't get time to finish it properly. Instead this is another one that I made earlier in 2017, and it's based on this random internet video I saw.

Spoiler

[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5tD1j4Zo-k[/media]

[media]https://youtu.be/O1zkEasdkBg[/media]
I'm afraid there's no fancy visuals this time around as there's not enough CPU time for them! I would have saved it to tape but I ran into the same problem as described here, so here's a snapshot instead.

Really good this. Takes me back to a random field, possibly in Wiltshire, in the early 90's. 4-bits seem more than enough. Thanks for posting.

Aye this is ace. Your stuff sounds different to the average AY (nice to have a bit of jungle instead of happy hardcore!). How is the synthesised speech done?

Thanks R-Tape! Honestly it was so long ago I can't remember how I even did most of this. The most difficult part was ripping 'clean' samples out of the song so that I just had the pure instruments with no other stuff in the background. The speech is just done like any other sample, but speech samples tend to be longer and so you have to be careful with the amount of memory they use.

Then I think I used this converter to convert the WAV samples to tape and loaded them into SampleTracker. If you look at the video it shows there's only 2048 bytes free, so I had to drop some of the samples as they wouldn't fit in RAM (I can't remember if I used a 48K or 128K machine though). Apparently SampleTracker even supports 8-bit samples, but you need a D/A convertor and it would use up a ton of memory, so it's a bit impractical.

EDIT: The link to wav2tap seems to be down, so I've reuploaded it here. It should probably be archived somewhere more permanent, but I don't know if there could be potential licensing issues.

djnzx48 wrote: ↑Sat May 19, 2018 6:06 am EDIT: The link to wav2tap seems to be down, so I've reuploaded it here. It should probably be archived somewhere more permanent

Cheers, this kind of stuff needs to be given ZXDB IDs at the very least. It'd be nice to preserve the utilities themselves too. It's all about finding the time at the mo.

Sorry if this one's a little rushed. It's a cover of the theme song to a '90s PC racing game, Wacky Wheels.

Spoiler

[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfzg2vuqia0[/media]

[media]https://youtu.be/j75-isLnWVU[/media]
wwheels.pt3

It's great, a bit more raw than the original but less like elevator music for it. Love the bit where it 'goes all squiggly' (3.50 and another time before).

Thanks! The 'squiggly bit' is one of the most common AY tropes, it crops up in almost every track from the '90s and early 2000s. It seems to have gone out of fashion a bit nowadays though.

Phew!! For the first time I've actually managed to complete a track from start to finish in less than a week. It's a TurboSound (2 AY chips) cover of Telephone Line by ELO, a song about R-Tape's poor phone reception while on holiday.

Spoiler

[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77R1Wp6Y_5Y[/media]

[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqYu9fQbcAA[/media]
telephone.pt3

Beautiful! (also love racket at the start)

The AY gives it a Japanese feel, I can’t help but picture it as manga end music, usually involving a couple standing on the shore looking out to sea while the credits roll.

Thanks! I'm guessing it's all the harmonies that give it that sound? I tried using just a single chip but I couldn't do it justice, so I thought might as well get my money's worth and make use of all the extra channels.

Now that, is brilliant

ELO, as well as Fleetwood Mac, Jethro Tull, Motorhead and The Beatles were a massive part of my childhood as they were always being played in the house or in the car. So anything Beep-tastic stuff by any of them will always get Freetime Thumbs Up from me

For those that have no idea what Freetime was then here you go:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQbMoCneuaM

Brilliant!! You captured all of this track really well, synth phone noises and all. ELO was a big part of my childhood. I used to listen to home-taped ELO on headphones plugged into the Ferguson tape deck that I used with my spectrum. Mono fantastic.

This is a great thread.

Thanks guys! I've got some ideas for more tracks in the future, but if anyone has requests for a track you want me to do, then feel free to PM me or post 'em here.

but if anyone has requests for a track

You've done it now!

If it was a an itch you ever wanted to scratch I'd like to hear a version of The Elements song, well the modern major general.

https://youtu.be/GFIvXVMbII0

Could be a good demo, either a regular periodic table or a speccy character one.

OK, I'll give it a go. I'll leave the Currah uSpeech programming part for someone else though!

[mention]R-Tape[/mention] how's this? Not my best I'm afraid but passable as long as you don't play it in mono.
[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YD9V7l9Wrc[/media]
elements.pt3

Oh my god that is superb, especially where you change tack at the end. Brought the biggest smile to my face.

This REALLY needs combining with a visual periodic table, I'll have to make some time.

It's slow going, but I'm getting somewhere. Hope I can do justice to your amazing track

Nice! I imagine it'd look great in colour, as long as there are no problems with colour clash. Don't see what's so great about the track lol, I'm sure it could be done far better

djnzx48 wrote: ↑Sun Jun 17, 2018 5:49 am Nice! I imagine it'd look great in colour, as long as there are no problems with colour clash.

It's 18 columns wide unfortunately and 1 char per element is too small, so 14 pix seems the best way to go. Makes colour tricky though.

If only the forces of nature dictated a more sensible number like 16...