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ST chiptunes

category: general [glöplog]
 
I remember an amazing demo on Atari, that played much more than 3 tracks. I had not the Atari, a friend showed me the demo. I have regrettably no other one indicate that chiptunes which played can be more than 16 tracks! Maybe it was a dirty trick with the 2149 or a Yamaha emulation that allow a lot of tracks.
Since the time I'm looking for this :|
i think you should describe visuals... anyway i'm offtopic...
added on the 2004-04-02 09:20:45 by apricot apricot
That won't be necessary, as there is no such thing as a "16 channel YM tune on Atari" on this planet. Never was and never will be either. I suppose StanZ was fooled by a spectrometer effect or something alike.
added on the 2004-04-02 09:55:08 by havoc havoc
Atari suxx!
There is no Amiga scene in the 16bits. AtariSt is the leader there!!! =)))
added on the 2004-04-02 15:46:37 by Optimus Optimus
I seem to recall that with the "SID-voice" effect, some musicians were able to produce an additional pseudo-track. Thus, you'd get 4 tracks. But definitely not 16. Maybe what you've heard was just a short digit mixed with some standard tones, hu? Or just a very good tune which gives the illusion of many tracks, although there are actually only 3 at a time...
added on the 2004-04-02 16:49:43 by knox knox
I think there was a way to play 3 ym tracks with digi-drums aswell. Can't think where I've seen (heard) it though.
added on the 2004-04-02 19:46:47 by Pete Pete
Maybe it was some kind of fancy spectrum analyzer? :)
added on the 2004-04-02 20:05:16 by keops keops
yes, some editors have 3 sid voices and 1 chan for digidrums.. the editor Jochen Hippel (Mad Max) used, for example! otherwise it's 3..
added on the 2004-04-02 20:51:01 by maktone maktone
Atari is lame, Amiga is fame !
(oh nooo! not that flame atari-amiga war again... lol)
added on the 2004-04-02 20:53:17 by EviL EviL
They would interrupt one of the tone voices to play very short drums?
added on the 2004-04-02 21:34:21 by eye eye
Knox is right, there are only two tricks to fake 'extra' sound channels. It's about letting a sidvoice either have different wavelength of the squares (the interupted square differs a bit from the hardware one) or change the period in the interupt. Needless to say the "extra" voice(s) will be in close relation to the original one(s).
Of course, there are still only three real voices playing.

The digidrum stuff is actually three channels (on ST), one of the synth channels is sacrificed for the drum. On STe (which has a DMA PCM soundchip as well) you can have three YM voices and two (or more with mixing) PCM voices.

The most fancy thing (so far) is Tao/Cream's Magic Synth v4. This one plays 3 channel YM with all thinkable extra effects along with three DMA-PCM voices which play generated synthsounds (more or less a SID-emultor). So six channels chipsounds there, but only three which comes for the YM. I think Tao is/was planning to add a fourth DMA channel as well.
added on the 2004-04-03 18:05:18 by evil evil
well, ok I've been fooled
Btw I've "seen" this demo 5 minutes (a STf), my friend just said "look this, tracks galore, unreal ... blah"
Musics weren't that great, but a lot of notes and fast bpm: I though it was real. At the time, overscan, syncroll, mod, and other impressive stuffs. Everything was possible
Thx
Well, judging by my brief investigation into SID music, there are multiple ways of faking out more channels...
1.) Clever reuse of background channel (Rob Hubbard - The Last V8)
2.) Fast Arpeggio (Tomas Zoran - Des Magiers Kugel) (I think)
3.) Putting a drum kick on waves (Joachim Wijinhoven - Merlin's Dream V2)

4.) Samplechannel (lots of tunes)
5.) Using the right samples in a sample channel (Anything by Cycleburner) (Though he apparently only used the sample channel)
6.) Clever reuse of samplechannel (Jeroen Tel - Turbo Outrun)
7.) (Software mixed?) Two-channel digi (Joachim Wijinhoven - Linko)

So given that the ST would seem to have more horsepower for software mixing of digis, plus the two channel DAC on the STE, I can see how you could fake out a bunch of channels. I don't know how good it would sound, though. And it would probably leave less time for video effects, though with a good coder and clever musician I bet it would work
added on the 2004-04-07 17:03:19 by crusader crusader
in my c64 days I did a program called Digitronix which was basicly a Rockmonitor (1 digichannel) clone but by using 4bit samples instead of eight and "mixing" them on the NMI you had 2 channels of samples and 3 channels of SID.

so yes, software mixed ... sounded okay for a c64

ofcourse the samples couldn't be pitched ... remember, this was in the eighties and I was a teen

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