Some new PC-Engine chiptunes

[Dicer]

Can we get these all as .pce files?

And where is my 2 unlimited already!?!?!?!?!

[Bonknuts]

I was looking over deflemask and I think I can write a converter to port PC-Engine specific XM files to deflemasks DMF format. I wonder how much cpu resource the PCE vgm player uses.

 Edit: I just saw this: https://github.com/BlockoS/dmf-player

[ccovell]

I don't remember musicians having to enter hex, either, but I may have just missed that.

Yeah, they did:
Reyn Ouwehand (C64): "Actually, I can't code at all. I did have to enter all the 'notes' in $hex."

Martin Galway: "No, there never was an editor to make it "easy"! It was always assembler source files..."

Tim Follin: Follin used drivers written by Stephen Ruddy for his early music on the Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, C64, Game Boy, Game Gear, Master System, NES, and ZX Spectrum. To utilize these drivers, Follin had to take his music and convert it to hexadecimal representations of the notes...
NES: He programmed the music in hexadecimal on MS-DOS...
SNES: Follin used an Ensoniq ASR10 keyboard. Even at this time, Tim still had to write and program the music in hexadecimal....

[Bonknuts]

<- PCE version of ChronoTrigger (deflemask)

[elmer]

Edit: I just saw this: https://github.com/BlockoS/dmf-player

Excellent! 

I don't remember musicians having to enter hex, either, but I may have just missed that.

Yeah, they did:

They certainly may have, particularly the first guy.

But I really suspect that there's more than a little hyperbole in those particular examples. 

Martin Galway: "No, there never was an editor to make it "easy"! It was always assembler source files..."

Martin Galway pretty-much kept his driver to himself, so he may indeed have typed in hex ... but it doesn't seem likely, since as-far-as-I-remember, he coded it himself, and would have been in the perfect position to equate the constants.

As he says, "assembler source files".

With him, and a lot of the other "contract" musicians at the time, the game programmer would just get a binary blob of code/data with the driver and music, and then be given a couple of entry points to call.

Tim Follin: Follin used drivers written by Stephen Ruddy for his early music on the Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, C64, Game Boy, Game Gear, Master System, NES, and ZX Spectrum. To utilize these drivers, Follin had to take his music and convert it to hexadecimal representations of the notes...
NES: He programmed the music in hexadecimal on MS-DOS...
SNES: Follin used an Ensoniq ASR10 keyboard. Even at this time, Tim still had to write and program the music in hexadecimal....

That really just sounds like a journalist talking, and not Tim Follin himself.

Yes, the note/duration equates do actually assemble directly down to hexadecimal values and sometimes even sound-chip frequency settings ... but the musician didn't have to type in "262" for a middle-C, they'd type in "C3", and the assembler would fix it up.

There's absolutely no way, especially by the SNES era, that Tim would have been typing in ...

34, 233, 11, 5, 63

instead of ...

INSTR, 15, ENV, 6, LENGTH, TRPL, C5, G5, C5, GS

To a journalist, they're both "hexadecimal" gobbledegook.

To an old 8-bit/16-bit musician, the first one is just magic-numbers, whereas the second one is a string of commands and notes (just like MML).

Would you say that anyone writing MML is "entering hex"?

After all ... that's really exactly what they're doing ... it's just made to look a little friendlier to make it easier for a musician to understand. 

<- PCE version of ChronoTrigger (deflemask)

That's brilliant!

I know that Arkhan really loves MML, but I've always thought that Trackers were a huge godsend for the productivity of chiptune musicians.

I'll have to get DefleMask ported over to the PC-FX! 

[Bonknuts]

Does the PCFX have a nice high res interrupt timer? I know it has ADPCM channels, but it'd be nice to manually drive some DDA channels. What's the v810's over head for interrupt calls?

[elmer]

Does the PCFX have a nice high res interrupt timer? I know it has ADPCM channels, but it'd be nice to manually drive some DDA channels. What's the v810's over head for interrupt calls?

The interrupt only gets processed at the end of an instruction, so there could be a 44-cycle latency if you've just started a floating-point division. That shouldn't be too much of a problem at 21.5MHz.

Then there's 6 cycles for 2 jumps before you get to your handler.

Then you've got to save whatever registers you use.

That's going to be better handled in a custom assembly-language routine rather than relying on the C compiler's "save-all-31-registers" approach.

The timer is a 16-bit register counting down at 1.431818MHz, so give it a value of 45 (or maybe 44 with some time to handle reloading the timer) and you've got a 32KHz interrupt.

All-in-all ... it's a really nice console design for 2D games.

[ultrageranium]

A sound driver is a piece of software on the target game system that reads notes (stored in some format) and plays them as music or sound effects, usually as part of a video game.  Usually the music notes were converted from a tracker / editor / MIDI sequencer on a PC because raw hex (which the sound driver reads) is not very "musician-readable".   

A lot of early game / home computer musicians were also programmers, so they wrote their own tracker/editor software and their own sound drivers too.  A lot of games also had NO music editor... just hex manually punched in on a keyboard (imagine MML but with even less visual structure.)  Hex entering music... that's hardcore, but oh so stupid.

Thanks!

Yes, the note/duration equates do actually assemble directly down to hexadecimal values and sometimes even sound-chip frequency settings ... but the musician didn't have to type in "262" for a middle-C, they'd type in "C3", and the assembler would fix it up.

Are there examples of very primitive, "hello, world." equivalent of simple sound drivers for the PCE or FC/NES or MD that I could look at? (ideally just very basic pitch/envelope control for one of the waveform generators, a notation system and a sequencer).

[ccovell]

Well, there's a simple sequencer here:  http://mindrec.com/?main=pce/index.

There's the "Ultimate PCE Sample Player" link

There's also my tool: http://www.pcenginefx.com/forums/index.php?topic=11401

And Arkhan's Squirrel MML compiler: http://www.aetherbyte.com/aetherbyte-squirrel_for_pc-engine_and_turbografx-16.html
(Though you need to bone up on MML first.

[Bonknuts]

Here's another PCE chiptune by the same artist:

 I looked at deflemask HES output option and the player is super simple. Anyone interested in doing a "music disk" for the PCE?

 Another:

[Bonknuts]

Can we get these all as .pce files?

 I'm working with the author to get HES files, which I'll put together as a single rom file for a "music disk".

[Dicer]

Can we get these all as .pce files?

 I'm working with the author to get HES files, which I'll put together as a single rom file for a "music disk".

You are the man...

I've been tinkering at making noises for the PCE, fun stuff maybe one day I'll slap it all into something that could be considered a "song"