PCE PCM

[Michirin9801]

Paula is hard panned L/R out of stupidity, kind of like how they voluntarily picked that shit tier palette for the C64.   They chose those colors willingly.    Someone sat down and said "yes, we need two shades of olive, and 3 shades of gray.  that is what will make this f*cker look great!"



Amiga music with headphones SUCKED: 

   

Agreed, it just seems like Commodore had a habit of making s*** design choices for their computers, even if the computers themselves turned out good in the end... Kinda like how the Nintendo had technically 64 colours in its palette, but 10 of them are black and 2 shades of grey and white are pretty hard to distinguish from one another, and thus could have been replaced with different colours (Maybe more yellows?)

But to some people those s*** design choices are what gives the respective systems their charm, which I understand even if I don't agree... (Seriously, I hate that hard-panning on the Amiga)

What kind of MD game are you making?  That sounds interesting.

I'll talk about it when I have something more presentable to show...
I'm currently in the process of remaking all the background graphics pretty much from scratch in order to squeeze some very needed extra colour and detail out of the limited palettes on the MD...
But since I'm too lazy and get distracted too easily _{and grow more of a distaste for the MD the more I work with it} I'm doing PC engine music, playing Galaxy Fraulein Yuna and drawing fanart of Yuna on my 3DS instead of actually working on the game... Shame on me I guess...

[TailChao]

I just want an expansion of the PCE sound. I don't want to necessarily replace the PCE sound, but something that works with it. 8bit mixing allows some bass to the PCE (thump/bump), and software samplebased synth gives it much more range with bass style instruments - as well as others (imagine using that orch hit in batman, but at any note/octave).

The AUDIO_IN pin is ready whenever you are.

[elmer]

I just want an expansion of the PCE sound.

The AUDIO_IN pin is ready whenever you are.

Wow ... bonknuts is going to make a Yamaha FM add-on for the PCE, and you heard it here, first!     

<edit>

C'mon ... you can get a YMF262 OPL3 FM chip + YAC512 DAC for $1.60 on fleabay ... we could totally blow-away all of those scummy MSX and Genesis guys!   

[Michirin9801]

C'mon ... you can get a YMF262 OPL3 FM chip + YAC512 DAC for $1.60 on fleabay ... we could totally blow-away all of those scummy MSX and Genesis guys!   

Oh I think we'll already blow them away by turning the PCE into a sampler without any extra hardware ;3

[Arkhan]

You're not turning the PCE into a sampler without any extra hardware.  It already is one, and always has been, lol.   I don't imagine this will really blow away MSX users.   Genesis maybe, but probably not.

I get that Elmer's remark was a bit tongue in cheek but, really, MSX's secret weapon is the ability to combine PSG, SCC, and FM together, assuming you want to be that mental and support 3 sound chips simultaneously.   Easy with an emulator, but doing a real game requires an SCC cartridge (and SCC chips if you want to make a real cartridge), and the assumption (a fair one) that users have FM.

 

It's pretty great, and offers a kind of sound PCE can't get to.  Micro Cabin's use of FM+PSG confuses me.  Their MSX soundtracks were better than the PCE ones, even though PCE was using CD audio for alot of it.

I've not heard anyone else ever replicate what they did. 

[Michirin9801]

You're not turning the PCE into a sampler without any extra hardware.  It already is one, and always has been, lol.   I don't imagine this will really blow away MSX users.   Genesis maybe, but probably not.

Well, I think the ability to play PCM samples doesn't exactly make the system a 'sampler', when I say "Sampler" I mean something more along the lines of the Super Nintendo, with sample looping and pitch-shifting and all, which the PCE cannot do natively (as far as I'm aware at least), but Bonkonuts pulled off in software which is really amazing!
Yeah I know Batman pulled off sample looping in software too, but not pitch-shifting, much less software mixing of 4 sampler channels on 2 hardware channels, it had a different sample for each note of the bass and the orch hits...

[Arkhan]

side note: speaking technically here, a "sampler" is the thing that grabs the samples and creates them.   Like the goony thing I used to plug into my Amiga to get samples onto it.

I can't say I've heard the term applied to the actual act of sample based synthesis.

It's cool that there's a thing happening to mix/shift/loop samples, but, these sort of things just drive the sound away from sounding like a PCE (assuming you do 6 channels of random shit you sampled).

losing PCE style leads sucks even if the thing replacing it is technically more advanced/better.    That's something to always be careful of when getting excited about having something do something it doesn't typically get used for.     That's why I'd personally ever only use sampling for percussion, or orchestra hits maybe.   



lol "Bonkonuts".   another great typo.   There's also been "Bonknauts".

[Black Tiger]

I think that full sample shifting bgms should be restricted to stuff like a title screen, menu or stage select screen. It would sound best mixed with chip sounds like many arcades were doing at the time. 4 sample shifting channels with 2 chip sound channels could still sound great and authentic if done right. I think that the key is only using samples, whether pitch shifted or not, for the right kinds of instruments.

[elmer]

C'mon ... you can get a YMF262 OPL3 FM chip + YAC512 DAC for $1.60 on fleabay ... we could totally blow-away all of those scummy MSX and Genesis guys!   

Well, on 2nd look, I think that we'd actually need a YMF289B OPL3 FM chip + YAC513 DAC, in order to meet the fast memory access timings of the PCE, and those cost a little bit more ... approx $6 per pair. 

Oh I think we'll already blow them away by turning the PCE into a sampler without any extra hardware ;3

Errr ... not at that CPU-cost, you won't! 

You're just creating a CPU-pumped soft-synth rompler, in the same way that you can on any old hardware that supports a DAC output and a reasonable memory layout for the samples.

It could be done on an Amiga just as well.

Now ... as I've said, the 4-channel fixed-rate playback into a 10-bit output using 2 PSG channels ... *that* interests me. That may well be practical for in-game usage.

Either way, whatever the cost/performance tradeoff a particular developer/musician team is willing to make, it should be easy to modify Huzak so that it'll use the Deflemask data for whichever channels you wish, and let some other code handle the mixing for the other channels ... or just build the capability into Huzak itself as optional choices at build-time.

The whole point is to have the dmf2pce converter and the driver itself both be Open Source so that anyone can abuse them as much as they desire.

I get that Elmer's remark was a bit tongue in cheek but, really, MSX's secret weapon is the ability to combine PSG, SCC, and FM together, assuming you want to be that mental and support 3 sound chips simultaneously.

Yep, totally tongue-in-cheek. 

I can't see anyone being interested-enough to produce an FM HuCard, even though it would (theoretically) be a fairly easy thing to do on a DUO/SuperCDROM.

From my personal POV, the MSX's base AY-3-8910 PSG is a total piece-of-sh*t (I've used it before), and Konami's SCC is pretty-close to our PCE PSG, so the only real extra that the MSX has (if you buy the add-on) is the Yamaha 8950 9-channel, 2-operator OPL1 FM chip.

So, if we added a Yamaha 289B 18-channel, 4-operator OPL3 FM chip, then we'd totally blow-away the MSX hardware, and actually beat the Sharp X68000's 8-channel, 4-operator YM2151 (which, yes, was also available as an MSX add-on)! 

BTW ... I absolutely *love* the sound of Yamaha's 4-operator FM synths. 

[elmer]

Well, I think the ability to play PCM samples doesn't exactly make the system a 'sampler', when I say "Sampler" I mean something more along the lines of the Super Nintendo, with sample looping and pitch-shifting and all, which the PCE cannot do natively (as far as I'm aware at least), but Bonkonuts pulled off in software which is really amazing!

Well, the sample-looping part is totally trivial.

I have absolutely no idea why Deflemask doesn't support it.

It's only a few lines of extra code, and has no noticeable CPU cost.

Heck ... an attack-sustain-release sample isn't much more code, and still has negligible cost.

It's the frequency-scaling, and then mixing that adds the cost (and the need for buffering).

[Arkhan]

The way you can combine the chips on MSX is what makes it particularly nice.  You don't get the OPL4 sound, but what you get is still nice.

[Michirin9801]

Now ... as I've said, the 4-channel fixed-rate playback into a 10-bit output using 2 PSG channels ... *that* interests me. That may well be practical for in-game usage.

That's exactly what I'm talking about! Giving the PC engine 8 channels, 4 of which are soft-mixed PCM onto 2 hardware channels playing pitch-shifting samples!

It's cool that there's a thing happening to mix/shift/loop samples, but, these sort of things just drive the sound away from sounding like a PCE (assuming you do 6 channels of random shit you sampled).

losing PCE style leads sucks even if the thing replacing it is technically more advanced/better.    That's something to always be careful of when getting excited about having something do something it doesn't typically get used for.     That's why I'd personally ever only use sampling for percussion, or orchestra hits maybe.   

Which is why my idea is to use the sampler channels for a sampled bass, percussion and maybe orch hits and strings, and play the lead and harmonic support in the remaining 4 hardware channels! We could use this driver to combine a sampled MD-style FM bass with SNES style drums, strings and orch hits and the PCE style leads! BLAM! Tenouttaten Tenouttaten Best Sound Best Sound!

Either way, whatever the cost/performance tradeoff a particular developer/musician team is willing to make, it should be easy to modify Huzak so that it'll use the Deflemask data for whichever channels you wish, and let some other code handle the mixing for the other channels ... or just build the capability into Huzak itself as optional choices at build-time.

Here's a suggestion, If Huzak is gonna support Bonknuts' PCM driver that you said you're interested in, why not support both the .dmf and .xi formats? I mean, he can already play .xi files on the PC engine with what he's currently got, and assuming you'll be able to use 4 sampler channels and 4 PSG channels at once you could load the two files and put out a single .hes or .pce file with the song using all 8 channels!
As for figuring out which two channels you're gonna soft-mix, well, I suggest channels 3 and 4 so that anyone wanting to use noise mode on channels 5 and 6 would be free to do so, and anyone who would be mental enough to use the hardware LFO would also be free to do so... (I mean no offense to LFO users, but seriously, that thing is useless)

The way I see it working is to use Deflemask for the 4 PSG channels (1, 2, 5 and 6) and then OpenMPT (or whichever mod tracker you prefer) with a 4 channel .xi file... Yeah it would be complicated on the musicians, but at least they'd be able to do 'something' with this driver...

But don't worry too much about that right now, one thing at a time, you first need to get Huzak running and doing its thing right?

Well, the sample-looping part is totally trivial.

I have absolutely no idea why Deflemask doesn't support it.

It's only a few lines of extra code, and has no noticeable CPU cost.

Heck ... an attack-sustain-release sample isn't much more code, and still has negligible cost.

It's the frequency-scaling, and then mixing that adds the cost (and the need for buffering).

At this point they might as well completely rewrite the way they handle samples on the PC engine...

[Arkhan]

I'm not sure SNES style echo-percussion (TM), and a shitty sampled FM bass will really be best-sound-best-sound.. lol

I have some stuff that would probably make nice samples though. 

A Roland or Yamaha drum machine from the 80s has some pretty good percussion samples that would fit in well with PCE style music.

[elmer]

That's exactly what I'm talking about! Giving the PC engine 8 channels, 4 of which are soft-mixed PCM onto 2 hardware channels playing pitch-shifting samples!

Avoiding any pitch-shifting is precisely what I'd want to do! 

But ... once you've got a version of the driver and IRQ code that uses a sample buffer, then it's trivial (from a driver POV) to choose whether you allow pitch-shifting or not, and see exactly what the cost is.

It's the UI and getting the musician's data into the right format that's the real PITA.

But don't worry too much about that right now, one thing at a time, you first need to get Huzak running and doing its thing right?

Yes, that is a rather important first-step, before any kind of sample-playback becomes relevant, or anyone gets too excited.

[Michirin9801]

I'm not sure SNES style echo-percussion (TM), and a shitty sampled FM bass will really be best-sound-best-sound.. lol

I have some stuff that would probably make nice samples though. 

A Roland or Yamaha drum machine from the 80s has some pretty good percussion samples that would fit in well with PCE style music.

We'll see about that when we actually get to using the sound driver, but for my taste, FM makes the best basses, samples make the best drums, orch hits and strings, and the PCE PSG makes the best leads ;3