I does certainly not have a music ear, but is that music related to Army Moves??
Well, not exactly the same tune, because it's a 48K sound, but it reminds me of this TV series. I've always supposed the authors of the game were inspired by this music to make the sound...
Well, not exactly the same tune, because it's a 48K sound,
Ah, now I do understand a thing. I bought the real game many years ago (for some reason I still remember when I first played it..) and back then I thought the music was quite good and it was certainly 128k music, also featuring the same melody during gameplay.
When testing the game now from WOS archive I did only get 48k sound in an emulated 128k machine when trying the first entry on the Army Moves page. After some checking it seems that 128k sound and music was added when Imagine made a english release of the game. This one sounds much better. (If it is anything like the TV serie I dare not say.) :razz:
Beeper games:
Ghostbusters - digitized speech and the singalong lyrics at the bottom of the screen - i thought this was brill mind you, I was about seven at the time.
A Day In The Life (a very simple/annoying in game beeper ditty but it was pretty cool that the tempo would speed up as you ran out of time)
Arkanoid
Renegade
AY:
Batman the movie
Robocop
New Zealand Story
Neverending Story
Cybernoid
Hmm, I think there maybe a slight movie bias to this list
Beeper: Avalon/Dragontorc Ping-Pong Cobra Jet Set Willy (the Moonlight Sonata at the start takes me right back whenver I hear it) Chase HQ (I used to love hearing the drum beat during the ending sequence)
AY: Ano Gaia Deflektor Dark Fusion (in fact, almost anything by Benn Daglish) F.I.R.E. Robocop
The two that stand out for me - the real drop-your-bacon-sandwich moments - were Zombie Zombie and Vectron.
Zombie Zombie was, I believe, the FIRST game with two-channel sound without the aid of a beeper, and Vectron was the first three-channel?
But I saw ZZ being demonstrated at a computer fair, hooked up to a synthesiser over MIDI (another first), and it sounded awesome. The cassette inlay had a circuit diagram to build your own MIDI hookup via the Interface One... but due to the fact that Sandy White had a faulty IF1, it only worked on his.
Vectron truly blew me away though - three channels with attack, decay, slides etc, and riffs nicked from Wendy Carlos' score from Tron. Full of win, really.
If I had to name one tune each for the best of... 48K and 128K Spectrums, I'd probably say:
48K - Fairlight (no sound during the game, but the fantastic opening tune more than makes up for it), and
128K - Starglider 128k. Though Auf weidersehen Monty 128K comes close.
Edit: I see Fog mentioned Project AY, damn! In my defence, I am working really hard here at work (well, skiving...), so I just scanned through the thread briefly. It's hard work, avoiding work, you know :sad:
Spectrum prefer all 3 channels of digi, maybe that's the reason (not popular at all on SID, although appeares).
It's not popular because 4-bit samples on the C64 are traditionally played on the volume register and ignore the SID channels entirely - that's why some tunes sound like they've got three SID channels and the samples, it's because they have...
The recent 8-bit routines (they're still less than two years old) do play samples with the SID registers themselves but it's not a straightforward job and there's lots of precise timing involved - but tunes like this that have samples played on one channel and SID sound on the other two can do things like pass the samples through the SID's filter.
Back on topic, Chronos will always be the "bloody hell!" moment for me as far as beeper music goes, i'd have to give AY a lot more thought... =-)
>Dark Fusion (in fact, almost anything by Benn Daglish)
Like above.
Again, my mistake... I loved the AY tunes for those two games that I remixed for my Speccy videos, they must have been from CPC versions instead then. Sorry.
Where can I get full details of the AY file format? My google searches keep coming back to the Project AY pages on WoS and there doesn't appear to be any file format info on there (nor in the file formats section of the documentation pages).
Full documentation and the original AY file format specifications can be found in the AYMakeR zip file. For extracting Z80 data from Spectrum code, the X128 emulator provides excellent options to dump user-defined blocks of code.
Full documentation and the original AY file format specifications can be found in the AYMakeR zip file.
Cheers for that. The AYMakeR readme file doesn't seem to go into much detail, especially with regard to how beeper tunes are stored.
are you looking for it on speccy side or say pc?
I wasn't after anything platform-specific, just detailed info on the file format itself, how to create an arbitrary .AY file, and how to play one back (specifically ones that contain beeper tracks rather than AY chip music), that sort of thing.
From what I've gathered from AYMakeR, AY files appear pretty-much to be just emulator snapshots with (optionally, at least) the non-music playing bits of Z80 code removed. I don't know quite what I was expecting, but it wasn't really that. n'er mind.
Ahah! Nice one - that's exactly the level of info I was after. Ta :)
Also I think (unless I'm being stupid, which is a distinct possibility) that there's a bug in AudioOverload when playing back Speccy beeper tunes; they replay far too slowly and shifted down a couple or three full tones in pitch. Maybe they're being replayed using Amstrad CPC clock settings or something? Either way, I tried MicroSpeccy and that worked okay for me.
Back on topic, Chronos will always be the "bloody hell!" moment for me as far as beeper music goes, i'd have to give AY a lot more thought... =-)
Well, surely AY chip should be as well-programmed as beeper is (last times Shiru made a real Z80 killer).
In comparison to that, the AY is used maybe in 50% on Spectrum.
The funny thing is ZX Spectrum is the only computer using hardware-only envelopes on its soundchip.
C64 guys play SID two times per frame or faster... Atari XL people play POKEY with even 4-times speed. Not to mention Atari ST (also 200hz or 50 but with clever SidSound).
All of them are most suprised when I say that we use only 50hz songs, only 1-time speed of playing.
Well, yes yes, we have demos with SidSound. All 2 of them. No music editors (everything must be written on Atari ST).
I realize that we can do only one channel of SidSound on Spectrum. But if it was good enough for Scavenger, so could be enough for us too. ;)
On the other hand we could try to push AY into some different side than ST guys did. Our own way of synthesis? Maybe something like "SoftSynth" editor for Atari XL's POKEY? I don't know. Gasman started to making 6 channels engine on one AY once (not finished project though).
Ah, it's just a loud thinking anyway.
I don't complain - I have tons of fantastic BEEPER programs for me. :)
Well, surely AY chip should be as well-programmed as beeper is (last times Shiru made a real Z80 killer).
In comparison to that, the AY is used maybe in 50% on Spectrum.
i s'pose it depends on where you want the music really; i'm generalising a lot obviously, but AY tends to be during play whilst beeper tunes are more for presentation screens.
The funny thing is ZX Spectrum is the only computer using hardware-only envelopes on its soundchip.
C64 guys play SID two times per frame or faster... Atari XL people play POKEY with even 4-times speed. Not to mention Atari ST (also 200hz or 50 but with clever SidSound).
Depends on the job in hand, for most game and demo use the C64 musicians tend to use single speed drivers (Martin Galway was an exception and others experimented, but i'd guess that well over 90% of the music actually used somewhere rather than produced as a competition entry is only being processed once a frame), and the A8 people only go for multi speed when the CPU isn't tied up doing other jobs (so presentation screens rather than during play) - but they also have a thing about dual POKEYs to get more channels with 16-bit frequencies. (Me personally, all the code i write for the A8 is using a single POKEY and refreshes once a frame - i want as much power for my code as possible, ta! =-)
i s'pose it depends on where you want the music really; i'm generalising a lot obviously, but AY tends to be during play whilst beeper tunes are more for presentation screens.
Yes, yes, that's what I ment exactly.
Developed music could be used for titlescreens and regular 50hz music would be used for in-game actions. Agreed.
There was one native AY tracker, Cacofony Pro System, which had 100hz mode. No one cared about, there is almost no music for it.
Vortex Tracker II allow to use any framerate, actually, but you will have to make your own player then, and that's the problem with all >50hz players on ZX, there is simply no easy way to get stable updates with any frequency other than 50hz.
Indeed! Very catchy too. So far I've found AWM, Kuiper Pursuit, Where the world stood still and Platoon to be pretty good so far as far as AY is concerned. Discovering more gems in this thread!
Comments
Well, not exactly the same tune, because it's a 48K sound, but it reminds me of this TV series. I've always supposed the authors of the game were inspired by this music to make the sound...
Ah, now I do understand a thing. I bought the real game many years ago (for some reason I still remember when I first played it..) and back then I thought the music was quite good and it was certainly 128k music, also featuring the same melody during gameplay.
When testing the game now from WOS archive I did only get 48k sound in an emulated 128k machine when trying the first entry on the Army Moves page. After some checking it seems that 128k sound and music was added when Imagine made a english release of the game. This one sounds much better. (If it is anything like the TV serie I dare not say.) :razz:
Ghostbusters - digitized speech and the singalong lyrics at the bottom of the screen - i thought this was brill mind you, I was about seven at the time.
A Day In The Life (a very simple/annoying in game beeper ditty but it was pretty cool that the tempo would speed up as you ran out of time)
Arkanoid
Renegade
AY:
Batman the movie
Robocop
New Zealand Story
Neverending Story
Cybernoid
Hmm, I think there maybe a slight movie bias to this list
Beeper:
Avalon/Dragontorc
Ping-Pong
Cobra
Jet Set Willy (the Moonlight Sonata at the start takes me right back whenver I hear it)
Chase HQ (I used to love hearing the drum beat during the ending sequence)
AY:
Ano Gaia
Deflektor
Dark Fusion (in fact, almost anything by Benn Daglish)
F.I.R.E.
Robocop
AY
Glider Rider 128k
Starglider 128k
Bionic commando 128k (level 1)
Zub 128k
Beeper
Sabre Wulf (even though it's a simple one-channel beeper, I think the tune's great)
Ping Pong
Jet set Willy (Title screen music)
Zombie Zombie was, I believe, the FIRST game with two-channel sound without the aid of a beeper, and Vectron was the first three-channel?
But I saw ZZ being demonstrated at a computer fair, hooked up to a synthesiser over MIDI (another first), and it sounded awesome. The cassette inlay had a circuit diagram to build your own MIDI hookup via the Interface One... but due to the fact that Sandy White had a faulty IF1, it only worked on his.
Vectron truly blew me away though - three channels with attack, decay, slides etc, and riffs nicked from Wendy Carlos' score from Tron. Full of win, really.
tunes.. hhmm ... sid owned / smashed it.. sorry.. like it or hate it galway, follin , JT (maniacs of noise) , hubbard smashed it...
errmm speccy
ping pong..
gyroscope
chonos / agent x
128.. dunno.. follins used to use a tantung and do cross platform versions (mike told me / was kind enough to give me info years ago)
I dunno about speccy 128 tunes.. I'd long gone.. but from what I heard AY wise.. prefer the sid.. can you do a digi channel on AY like the sid?
Yes. There are several of them.
However it didn't become popular somehow.
A pity.
Spectrum prefer all 3 channels of digi, maybe that's the reason (not popular at all on SID, although appeares).
However I like chiptunes with digi channel very much.
http://mister_beep.republika.pl/
Hello,
>AY:
>Ano Gaia
This is not AY. It's beeper.
>Deflektor
Like above.
>Dark Fusion (in fact, almost anything by Benn Daglish)
Like above.
http://mister_beep.republika.pl/
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/projectay/
If I had to name one tune each for the best of... 48K and 128K Spectrums, I'd probably say:
48K - Fairlight (no sound during the game, but the fantastic opening tune more than makes up for it), and
128K - Starglider 128k. Though Auf weidersehen Monty 128K comes close.
Edit: I see Fog mentioned Project AY, damn! In my defence, I am working really hard here at work (well, skiving...), so I just scanned through the thread briefly. It's hard work, avoiding work, you know :sad:
C
POKE 23607,0 or POKE 23659,0 or POKE 23609,255 or 10 POKE 23681,64 : LLIST
http://fromhedberg.se/sidor/Retro/Fairlight/fairlight.htm
It's not popular because 4-bit samples on the C64 are traditionally played on the volume register and ignore the SID channels entirely - that's why some tunes sound like they've got three SID channels and the samples, it's because they have...
The recent 8-bit routines (they're still less than two years old) do play samples with the SID registers themselves but it's not a straightforward job and there's lots of precise timing involved - but tunes like this that have samples played on one channel and SID sound on the other two can do things like pass the samples through the SID's filter.
Back on topic, Chronos will always be the "bloody hell!" moment for me as far as beeper music goes, i'd have to give AY a lot more thought... =-)
http://binaryzone.org/podcast/
There's a Speccy 48K music special and a show devoted to AY music in series 1. :D
My mistake...
Again, my mistake... I loved the AY tunes for those two games that I remixed for my Speccy videos, they must have been from CPC versions instead then. Sorry.
Yes but I would like them as mp3s, I can't work out to play AY files on a Mac let alone an iPod.
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I'll second that (and great backgrounds by FD Thorpe to boot)
bloody trendys ;) get yaself a decent puter :D
http://www.bannister.org/software/ao.htm
as for porting to mp3.. audacity.... record what you hear.. :)
much like when you make music , you can do em dry (direct) or thru fx... and bounce
Full documentation and the original AY file format specifications can be found in the AYMakeR zip file. For extracting Z80 data from Spectrum code, the X128 emulator provides excellent options to dump user-defined blocks of code.
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/projectay/tech.htm
are you looking for it on speccy side or say pc?
I wasn't after anything platform-specific, just detailed info on the file format itself, how to create an arbitrary .AY file, and how to play one back (specifically ones that contain beeper tracks rather than AY chip music), that sort of thing.
From what I've gathered from AYMakeR, AY files appear pretty-much to be just emulator snapshots with (optionally, at least) the non-music playing bits of Z80 code removed. I don't know quite what I was expecting, but it wasn't really that. n'er mind.
http://projectay.dl.spilsby.net/AY_Spec.txt
Also I think (unless I'm being stupid, which is a distinct possibility) that there's a bug in AudioOverload when playing back Speccy beeper tunes; they replay far too slowly and shifted down a couple or three full tones in pitch. Maybe they're being replayed using Amstrad CPC clock settings or something? Either way, I tried MicroSpeccy and that worked okay for me.
Aaaarrghh! The bloody tune is now stuck in my head! lol
Bytes:Chuntey - Spectrum tech blog.
Oh no problem at all, I'm just emphasizing. :) Actually it's good for beeper that people mistake it with 4-bit devices. :)
http://mister_beep.republika.pl/
Well, surely AY chip should be as well-programmed as beeper is (last times Shiru made a real Z80 killer).
In comparison to that, the AY is used maybe in 50% on Spectrum.
The funny thing is ZX Spectrum is the only computer using hardware-only envelopes on its soundchip.
C64 guys play SID two times per frame or faster... Atari XL people play POKEY with even 4-times speed. Not to mention Atari ST (also 200hz or 50 but with clever SidSound).
All of them are most suprised when I say that we use only 50hz songs, only 1-time speed of playing.
Well, yes yes, we have demos with SidSound. All 2 of them. No music editors (everything must be written on Atari ST).
I realize that we can do only one channel of SidSound on Spectrum. But if it was good enough for Scavenger, so could be enough for us too. ;)
On the other hand we could try to push AY into some different side than ST guys did. Our own way of synthesis? Maybe something like "SoftSynth" editor for Atari XL's POKEY? I don't know. Gasman started to making 6 channels engine on one AY once (not finished project though).
Ah, it's just a loud thinking anyway.
I don't complain - I have tons of fantastic BEEPER programs for me. :)
http://mister_beep.republika.pl/
i s'pose it depends on where you want the music really; i'm generalising a lot obviously, but AY tends to be during play whilst beeper tunes are more for presentation screens.
Depends on the job in hand, for most game and demo use the C64 musicians tend to use single speed drivers (Martin Galway was an exception and others experimented, but i'd guess that well over 90% of the music actually used somewhere rather than produced as a competition entry is only being processed once a frame), and the A8 people only go for multi speed when the CPU isn't tied up doing other jobs (so presentation screens rather than during play) - but they also have a thing about dual POKEYs to get more channels with 16-bit frequencies. (Me personally, all the code i write for the A8 is using a single POKEY and refreshes once a frame - i want as much power for my code as possible, ta! =-)
Yes, yes, that's what I ment exactly.
Developed music could be used for titlescreens and regular 50hz music would be used for in-game actions. Agreed.
http://mister_beep.republika.pl/
Vortex Tracker II allow to use any framerate, actually, but you will have to make your own player then, and that's the problem with all >50hz players on ZX, there is simply no easy way to get stable updates with any frequency other than 50hz.
Indeed! Very catchy too. So far I've found AWM, Kuiper Pursuit, Where the world stood still and Platoon to be pretty good so far as far as AY is concerned. Discovering more gems in this thread!
Bytes:Chuntey - Spectrum tech blog.