Saturday, April 4, 2009

New Acquisition



Just received my latest toy. A PAL Soundic MPT-03 Console (Clone of an Emerson Arcadia 2001 )

And just inside, a socketed Ceramic Signetics UVI 2637 ... Already got the 9Bit noise pattern from it (and surprise its the SAME as TIA Distortion 8!). But some games generate odd mixed patterns that i'll surely be investigating in the future.

Monday, March 30, 2009

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.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

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.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

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...)

Saturday, February 28, 2009

Small update

Sync Buzzer is DONE! ...
Good thing is that new oscillator code opens the door to tons of other cool new sounds... but you will just have to wait until the demos are out!!!