Bug or Feature?

Hi

Just having some fun with my dev build of chipsounds trying out my new Pokey oscillator code. Here we have the eternal programmer question...

Is THIS SOUND a bug or a FEATURE?

Safe to say, chipsounds will contain some extra "note quite accurate" fake-chips in there.

3 Brothers

What do you do when you want to lower your stress level? Solder of course :)

I wanted to free my breadboards and "stabilise" my test suite against hardware, so i spent a few hours doing those two new boards.

Pokey Trials

Here's a photo of my current breadboard for my Pokey. Just missing a clock divider hooked to my 3.57Mhz crystal to get the desired 1.79Mhz. (doing alright with a 2.0 MHz one at the moment for diagnostics).

Pokey is odd, really. and a challenge to integrate in my current Synthesizer code. All bit patterns (or distortions) vary across frequencies and even sometimes retriggering. This seems to be due to the various Pokey internal sub clocks not keeping synch at all time (frequency divider vs 5bit poly vs 4bit poly vs 9/17bit poly).. to make matters worse, there is also various tweaks to the frequency divider (2 channel mode vs 4 channel mode, etc).

Heres a VERY HARSH sound example of 4 different triggerings of a 9bit noise pattern. warning., this is GRITTY! (the last one is more musical, which is interresting)

My goal is to find the best solution to give the user the widest palette of variations and randomness, representative of someone actually programming a song on a a800 (contemporary tracker writers ares still going mad with those sync problems...)