pcmplay - new dragon sound routine
Posted: Sat Sep 05, 2015 10:02 pm
Hi everyone,
Please allow me to quickly introduce myself, since this is my first post. I'm utz, chiptune musician and coder. I normally make music and music routines for ZX Spectrum and other machines with 1-bit sound. Never owned a Dragon, but I do like the machine.
Some years ago I stumbled across "Music Maestro" for the Dragon, and immediately took a liking to the sound of the 6-bit DAC. However, Music Maestro is very tedious to use, so I never actually made much with it. But some time ago, I started to think about writing my own sound routine for the Dragon. And in the last days, I finally put that plan into practise.
So, without further ado, here's pcmplay. It's my first piece of 6809 code, so please bear with me Sound is not as clean as I hoped for, but alright for a first attempt, I think.
Anway, the features are as follows:
- 4 channels of PCM WAV playback
- samples have 4-bit depth and are fixed length 256 byte loops
- 16-bit frequency dividers, with a total of 5 octaves
- mixing at a discretion frequency of 7295 Hz
So, it's less powerful than for example CocoTracker, but it also takes less memory. Enough bla bla, here's a demonstration of how it sounds:
https://soundcloud.com/irrlicht-project ... tandy-coco
The source code + demo .bin file can be downloaded at
https://github.com/utz82/pcmplay/archive/master.zip
The code comes with an XM converter for convenient editing of the music. It is however not a general purpose MOD/XM converter, as it only accepts it's own, specially crafted template XM.
Hope you enjoy!
cheers,
-utz
Btw, big thanks to Simon Jonassen for all his help and great advice!
Please allow me to quickly introduce myself, since this is my first post. I'm utz, chiptune musician and coder. I normally make music and music routines for ZX Spectrum and other machines with 1-bit sound. Never owned a Dragon, but I do like the machine.
Some years ago I stumbled across "Music Maestro" for the Dragon, and immediately took a liking to the sound of the 6-bit DAC. However, Music Maestro is very tedious to use, so I never actually made much with it. But some time ago, I started to think about writing my own sound routine for the Dragon. And in the last days, I finally put that plan into practise.
So, without further ado, here's pcmplay. It's my first piece of 6809 code, so please bear with me Sound is not as clean as I hoped for, but alright for a first attempt, I think.
Anway, the features are as follows:
- 4 channels of PCM WAV playback
- samples have 4-bit depth and are fixed length 256 byte loops
- 16-bit frequency dividers, with a total of 5 octaves
- mixing at a discretion frequency of 7295 Hz
So, it's less powerful than for example CocoTracker, but it also takes less memory. Enough bla bla, here's a demonstration of how it sounds:
https://soundcloud.com/irrlicht-project ... tandy-coco
The source code + demo .bin file can be downloaded at
https://github.com/utz82/pcmplay/archive/master.zip
The code comes with an XM converter for convenient editing of the music. It is however not a general purpose MOD/XM converter, as it only accepts it's own, specially crafted template XM.
Hope you enjoy!
cheers,
-utz
Btw, big thanks to Simon Jonassen for all his help and great advice!