Atari, Pinball & RMT

I am building a controller for a Gottlieb system 1 game, GENIE (link: http://www.ipdb.org/...chtype=advanced ) using an Atari 130XE. I have finished the interface & controller board, which is a bunch of serial to parr shift registers, mosfets and drivers, uln2083 chips, etc. The XE scans the switch matrix, performs the game logic and ouputs signal to lamps, solenoids and the score displays.

I want to add some BGM sound and effects and stumbled upon RMT. I played some of the samples and its awesome, but intimidating to a non musician type like me. I want the I dream of Jeannie tune to play upon startup (maybe 4 bars), some cool pinball like BGM, and some sound effects when It scores, 10x, 100x, 1000x etc. I don't use any display capability from the XE so VBI should work well for this. Can I poke the display off and still have vbi interrupt. Can RMT play BGM and pop sound effects in too, or can this be done with a dual Pokey mod?

I read the thread on the best sounds and would like to use some of these sounds in the game. Has anyone ripped them and could they called easily from my ML routine? Can the I dream of Jeannie song be done easily as well. Any help or submissions would be welcome. I' really excited about this.

Thanks in advance!!!

Turning off screen DMA doesn't affect VBIs.

POKE 559,0 will disable all screen DMA, which frees up cycles and increases raw speed by >30%.

Using a lores graphics mode can have a similar effect. e.g. GRAPHICS 2.

The problem with digitized sound effect playback isn't so much lack of cycles, but timing because the screen DMA is sporadic. In GRAPHICS 0, you lose almost all cycles during the first scan line of each of the 24 text lines, and about a third of cycles during other scanlines. And you lose very few cycles during non-display scanlines (borders).

VBLANK causes problems too. You can set the CRITIC flag (66 dec?) which disables the stage2 VBlank routines. Or just disable VBIs altogether.