55 replies to this topic

[atari2600land]

revolutionika, on Thu Oct 21, 2010 7:17 PM, said:

when will you finish this?

are you going to put it on a cart?

and dont change the name if you do!!!

The answer to both questions is "I have no idea."

[SpiceWare]

atari2600land, on Tue Oct 19, 2010 4:44 AM, said:

The snowman's name is Frosty (yes, I'm aware of the 2007 Holiday Cart, I worked on it after all, and unless the guy who programmed Stay Frosty pops his head in here and objects)

why would I object? Calling a snowman Frosty goes back long before I was even born.

[jbaudrand]

I really like the way you code the music ingame because it's really memory optimized, but I can't understand how the musicData and beatData works.
Is it something like that:

musicData:
1,2,3 with "1" for tone of Channel 0, "2" for tone of channel 1, "3" for channel 0...
beatData:
1,2,3 with "1" for duration of note 1, "2" duration of note 2...

or is it totally something else?

[atari2600land]

To tell you the truth, I don't understand either. Ask AA Member "thegoldenband", he's the one that coded it.

[thegoldenband]

Hey, jbaudrand --

I got your PM but thought it would be easier just to reply here. I wrote the music but didn't actually code the music engine (IIRC it was coded by Kisrael), but I can tell you how it works, more or less. The data tables for musicData and beatData control the two voices of the TIA. The data is stored in pairs of numbers, where the first number is a 5-bit number representing pitch (31 is lowest) which is sent to AUDFx, and the second one is duration as expressed in 60Hz frames. "-1" means silence, so if you have something like

31,6,-1,2

That means "play note #31 for 6/60 of a second, then be silent for 2/60 of a second".

You'll note that this doesn't allow for direct alteration of volume (AUDVx) or timbre (AUDCx), and I've since moved on to an updated version of this music engine that adds more fine-grained control. But the simple engine I used for the music atari2600land has incorporated into his game is a good place to start. I hope this is helpful!

Edited by thegoldenband, Sat Jun 25, 2011 9:44 AM.

[jbaudrand]

Many many thanks for explain us how it work.
and I wish you good luck for your next engine!