More questions about PCE audio capabilities

[elmer]

Personally all I need is for one or two instruments to update their pitch at a high speed, just the pitch, more specifically the Kick you hear in that song, although it would be nice to have a snare that did it as well, but that one would need the aforementioned white noise envelope...

The way I'm doing it in this song is that I'm using the Fixed Arpeggio macro in order to change the pitch on every 480th by 4 notes for 16 ticks, and on the 17th tick I change the waveform to a distorted sawtooth  that serves as my bass, and whenever I need to play just the kick I cut out the note on the 17th tick preventing the bass to be played...

In order to achieve that I'd need the Arpeggio Macro, the Volume macro and the Wave macro to be updated at 480hz only in channel 1 and only when that instrument is being played, but that's for just this one song, depending on the song I may wanna put a similar kick with or without the bass attached to it on channel 6, but that's just me, some different people might wanna do something completely different, but I'd imagine if they raised their frequency that high, they're probably not even thinking of playing anything in real hardware and probably just making a chiptune for the sake of making a chiptune...

OK, your timing is good ... I'm ready to take a break from what I'm working on, and it's a good time to get back to working on Huzak. 

While I'm at it, I need to check out some of the .dmf files again and see what people need in terms of sample playback.

Life sure would be easy if I could just limit people to a single sample at a time (played back on any channel, it wouldn't matter which, and could change during a song).

[Michirin9801]

OK, your timing is good ... I'm ready to take a break from what I'm working on, and it's a good time to get back to working on Huzak. 

While I'm at it, I need to check out some of the .dmf files again and see what people need in terms of sample playback.

Life sure would be easy if I could just limit people to a single sample at a time (played back on any channel, it wouldn't matter which, and could change during a song).

Alright, I'm gonna make a 'Huzak-friendly' version of that song and send it to you soon!
As for the sample stuff, it's pretty rare for people to use them for more than just drums in a single channel, but it would be nice to accommodate for two or three samples being played at the same time...

[elmer]

In order to achieve that I'd need the Arpeggio Macro, the Volume macro and the Wave macro to be updated at 480hz only in channel 1 and only when that instrument is being played, but that's for just this one song, depending on the song I may wanna put a similar kick with or without the bass attached to it on channel 6, but that's just me, some different people might wanna do something completely different, but I'd imagine if they raised their frequency that high, they're probably not even thinking of playing anything in real hardware and probably just making a chiptune for the sake of making a chiptune...

Well, a quick test shows that the cost of running one channel's instrument macros at 480Hz bumps your test-tune from 5.1% of CPU time to 8.6% of CPU time. So just 3.5% more.

That's not a huge deal, especially when compared to a single 7KHz sample channel costing about 8.5% (+4% for each extra channel).

You could probably run 2 drum channels at a 240Hz update rate and come in at around 3% of CPU time ... i.e. perfectly game-usable, especially if it left a single sample channel for sound-effects.

Heck ... you might even use the technique on an extra channel to remove the need for some kinds of sampled SFX at all! 

[Michirin9801]

Well, a quick test shows that the cost of running one channel's instrument macros at 480Hz bumps your test-tune from 5.1% of CPU time to 8.6% of CPU time. So just 3.5% more.

That's not a huge deal, especially when compared to a single 7KHz sample channel costing about 8.5% (+4% for each extra channel).

You could probably run 2 drum channels at a 240Hz update rate and come in at around 3% of CPU time ... i.e. perfectly game-usable, especially if it left a single sample channel for sound-effects.

Heck ... you might even use the technique on an extra channel to remove the need for some kinds of sampled SFX at all! 

Very informative! I suppose these kicks could sound fine at 240Hz, and I'd most likely only need them, I know I suggested an overclocked snare as well, but PSG snares sound fine even at the regular 60Hz if you ask me... Now 240Hz would also be pretty useful for sound effects, at that frequency I probably wouldn't even need samples unless I wanted to play voices...

Yeah, 2 channels at 240Hz for only 3% CPU time sounds like a bargain! But it would be one for drums and only sometimes, and the other for sound effects, and again, only sometimes, I'll definitely keep this in mind whenever I work on a PCE game soundtrack...