Scening

Announce (tech) demos or games releases

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Graz
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Scening

Post by Graz » Sat Jun 12, 2010 8:11 pm

I've been working on a bunch of demo effects on Genesis and I think I have enough to put together a reasonable production. Problem is, I have absolutely no artistic or musical talent. Everything I have now is programatically generated (which looks OK), ripped, or is 'programmer art'.

Anyone interested in (and capable of) making music and/or artwork for a Genesis demo? Alternatively, anyone know where I might solicit such help?

Shiru
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Post by Shiru » Sat Jun 12, 2010 8:34 pm

There are not too much composers who able to make music for SMD. Just check places like 8bc, listen the music, and if you like music of a certain composer, ask him personally for contribution. I'm pretty sure that most of the composers will be glad to help you.

Regarding artists, you should understand they are in the same situation like you as coder. They too need someone to tell what to do, and the someone is the designer. It could be you or someone else, and the designer's duty is to make clear plan for others to follow (how it will look, which graphics needed, etc).

Graz
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Post by Graz » Sat Jun 12, 2010 9:05 pm

For music, I can use anything - not necessarily FM or tracked, even. There are some constraints, but I'm planning to only use DAC for audio.

I think the music influences the design quite heavily. Anyway, even if I knew what the design was going to be ahead of time, I don't have the artistic skill to execute it.

I'll try over at 8bc, but as I said, I'm not necessarily looking for chip music.

Shiru
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Post by Shiru » Sat Jun 12, 2010 9:49 pm

Well, it is up to you, about the music, but my personal opinion that PCM music in SMD demo is plain uncool. FM+PSG synth is one of the coolest and somewhat unique features of the console, and low-quality PCM stream can't impress anyone.

Also, you have to stop Z80 while doing DMA, so if you play long PCM sample using Z80, you have to forget about using DMA, which is important for a demo.

Graz
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Post by Graz » Sat Jun 12, 2010 11:47 pm

Fair point. Well, if I can find something that seems right that uses FM only, I can use it. There's a lot of cool stuff on 8bc. However, if you get the timing right, the sample rate high enough, and suitable source material, I think DAC music can be usable. Both are options. I just don't want to exclude potential musicians that aren't tracking for FM.

Chilly Willy
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Post by Chilly Willy » Sun Jun 13, 2010 6:37 pm

If you do use PCM music, just google for Creative Commons music. As long as you aren't selling it, CC allows you to use the music with just attribution. No need to explicitly get permission as that's what the license is for. You only need permission if your work is intended to be commercial.

As for how it sounds, low compression on 22kHz PCM sounds good on the MD and doesn't take too much space (about 6 to 7KB per second).

mic_
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Post by mic_ » Mon Jun 14, 2010 8:22 am

I agree that the YM2612 is one of the special characteristics of the Genesis, so I'd much rather have FM music in a Genesis demo than some MOD player that outputs to the DAC.

Here's an example of some really good FM music (made by a guy whose name I can't remember): http://jiggawatt.org/muzak/moonblaster_stratarm.mp3

Granted, this song was made for the MSX MoonSound add-on which has more channels available than the YM2612, but it still shows what's possible with a good musician who knows how to work with FM synths.

Gigasoft
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Post by Gigasoft » Mon Jun 14, 2010 7:28 pm

Here are some examples of Mega Drive music composed by me.
Giga Man Adventure - Sneak peaks

My sound engine doesn't support DAC output while playing music though, because I thought DAC sounds would sound too choppy with music processing going on at the same time.

dtech
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Post by dtech » Tue Jun 15, 2010 6:44 am

Out of the ones (these few) explicitly posted there (not 8bc) I personally find the GigaMan's "wereseal" to be the most musical example :) Maybe could be improved a little by turning volumes down of some channels and instruments, but that's details.

I mean not like the demo style music where prevails strange FM-trance electronica type of beat over the many c64/mod times arpeggios and extreme voice settings tweaking and mocking tb303 & tr808 :) Oftenly such music sounds cool only to those, who know that certain specific feature or sound is not easily obtainable from the hardware the demo is running on. For others - music oftenly lacks any other musical quality other than complexity.

It's not that I don't like demo, RAD tracker (for those who remember a thing under dos) or MOD/S3M/IT/669/XM/STM music - I did such stuff more then ten years ago myself, I was a huge fan of all of this, especially 64k compos for dos and so on. It's just that typical demo music (especially if acoompanied by eyes killing wobbly shaky wavy jumpy palettescrolly scrolltext) may be something a little too worn out. Just like showing x-mode graphics to somebody. Woow 320x256 (!) graphics mode under dos on VGA, with per-scanline altered palette to show more than 256 colors - amazing! :))

Well but that's only my humbe opinion.

Anyways, I think I could provide some royality free drum samples if ever needed. I could also provide some music as set of wave loops, if FM will not be used or used only as solo&bass instrument.

PCM track in addition to FM&PSG is actualy a must - while it's some technical z80 challenge, it gives that grit to the sound that FM totally lacks (it's sterile and glossy as a plastic doll, even when feedback is at max - it's still just a sterile glossy plastic doll but with BDSM stuff and collar with spikes)

This, however reminds us, that we are lacking a serious, opensource music composing tool with all the bells and whistles of MD: FM+PSG+PCM with ability to use special 4-freq channel 3 mode as well. No offence to TFM, it's cool tool, but not realy exact match for genny :)
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TmEE co.(TM)
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Post by TmEE co.(TM) » Wed Jun 16, 2010 8:17 pm

There's a chance I may just give out my current MD sound system once I start working on and finish new implementation of my MD sound system....
You would need a MS-DOS capable PC with LPT port, flash cart and a cable to get sounds etc. from it... emulation will not do

http://8bc.org/members/TmEE/

some music from my sound system ^^
Mida sa loed ? Nagunii aru ei saa ;)
http://www.tmeeco.eu
Files of all broken links and images of mine are found here : http://www.tmeeco.eu/FileDen

Gigasoft
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Post by Gigasoft » Wed Jun 16, 2010 9:57 pm

On most Mega Drive sound systems, including the one just mentioned, the digitized samples sound way too broken. This was not so much of a problem in Sonic 1 and Phantasy Star IV, because the main sound engine was implemented on the 68000, with the Z80 dedicated to digitized samples, but this method steals valuable processing time from the actual game. One could also solve the problem in the way it was done in Kid Chameleon, where the DAC code is called at regular intervals during music processing.

To avoid having to disable the Z80 when doing DMA, interrupting the sound, one could arrange things so that PSG updates are done at a time when DMA isn't used.

Perhaps I should release my sound code too? I haven't made an authoring tool yet, so at the moment this is how all my music is made:

Code: Select all

music20 .dw 1000
.dw trkt1,$200c,trkt2,$e10,trkt3,$5a12,trkt4,$5a1a,trkt5,$2012,trkt6,$10
.dw trkt7,$4,trkt8,$4,trkd7,0,trkt9,$4
trkt1 .db $f0
.dw trkt1c
trkt1d .db $f3,8,10,2,$e0,$60
trkt1e .db $60,$71,$76,$f6,$18,2,12,$e8,$96,$94,$d3,$94,$74,$71,$6d,$6a,$73,$f6,$18,1,12
.db $b3,$b0,$60,$e0,$45,$ec,1
.dw trkt1e
.db $e0,$60,$79,$74,$72,$6d,$e8,$76,$e8,$78,$76,$95,$40,$56,$58,$55,$96,$40,$58,$59,$56
etc...
In my system, a medium length song is typically less than 1000 bytes in size, so a lot of music can be fitted into a game.

mic_
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Post by mic_ » Thu Jun 17, 2010 7:57 am

You would need a MS-DOS capable PC with LPT port, flash cart and a cable to get sounds etc. from it...
Are you saying that your sound tools require MS-DOS (i.e. can't run from within Windows) and an LPT port? Because that would be really weird :P

Neither the MD Myth or the Everdrive uses LPT for uploading ROMs, and considering the low price of the Everdrive I don't see why anyone would buy an old LPT-interfaced cart like the ones from Tototek.

Shiru
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Post by Shiru » Thu Jun 17, 2010 8:12 am

He means that the sound is produced by console connected to the PC through a cable and LPT port. And the tools in QBasic, I guess.

mic_
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Post by mic_ » Thu Jun 17, 2010 8:38 am

Uh-huh.
It's strange that hardware people seem to prefer outdated tools like QB :P
Isn't LPT communication almost as easy in a Windows program? (e.g. DeviceIoControl to LPT1 with the IOCTL_PP_ enumerators)

dtech
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Post by dtech » Thu Jun 17, 2010 10:12 am

LPT+DOS is quite a nice stuff. Quite contrary to anything like windows, anything tied to USB, even any usual non RT optimized cutdown linux kernels, macos, whatever else is clumsy nonrealtime full of surprises son of a b*tch crappy performing stream flow hickup overcomplicated crap never ready when you want it to...

I still miss DOS & LPT dev stuff and gear, as well as Roland MPU401 as ISA-8 card for MIDI... Regarding PC there's almost nothing more stable, fast and hardware-like performing than that :-/ And it's bad how rapidly evrything degrades.

I still have a dusty windows 3.11 comp (a P2-266 with 48MB ram) with cakewalk pro and roland mpu401. You know - nothing ever performed more stable and kick ass solid as that. Reinstalling? WTF when and why? I installed or even better - copied everything when I bought hardware - about 15 years ago - why wouldn't it perform any worse then in the first day? It's just that it doesn't work with any largee midi interface/patchbay units so it's stuck in this state forever :-/

Quite sad to see all the other stuff with gigahertz/dualcore/terabyte/gigabyte/hunderds of megabits transferrate/whatever other crap we are fed, to perform that weak as it does :(

It's completely unnecessary thing we do (and find it soo elite) to waste taime on cutting down and optimizing OS, fighting with processes and crapware we dont need, most of people having resource hungry antivirus crap installed, or even worse - any legal software with iLok USB license key or similar looser stuff.

I have legal software for my studio and I regret it. Both Cakewalk and Cubase.

USB is the biggest disaster, as anything else touched by intel geniuses :)

99% of things with USB are just kludges that are still using rs232 (COM) or LPT stuff, just wrapped in quite a lot of unnecessary layers and driver levels. It cannot perform any better than what it is inside, even if it is overclocked, because of too many driver and software layers, each having a lot of buffers, exceptions, processing and sorting latency, e.t.c.

You can have a thing that works in DOS with LPT, or port of it to windows, that will use overclocked virtual serial port and FTDI245 chip on the other side that will be somewhat the same as LPT in hardware side. For the user it will look much more appealing, but will perform much worse and less stable, even while it seems faster. Expect losing some bytes on some machines when moving large streams, expect anything realtime ruining hickups (actually transfer consists of only a bursts and hickups), expect many other strange surprises...

To fix such stuff you need much more complicated and sophiscated hardware, that handles all timing-critical processing and playback in itself, what requires large memory buffer (because you know that redrawing clock in taskbar or shudden checking for whatever updates, or processing engless broadcasted eth packets is much more important than that useless user application). Large buffer and playback handling in hardware means nowhere near realtime response from the pc/mac controls. And for recording some synchronous input (let's say midi in) to some track in your application, how yuo need even more hellish hardware that will pack incoming midi in data with timing tokens that are retrieved form stream that is at that very time being transfered out of it.

And don't be too much surprised that pc/mac will just not be ready to work with you that very day you will feel like creating something.

Just like if you create that usb hardware and then start fighting with a more awesome surprise: windows detecting your simple-serial-port-bridge-over-crappy-usb based unit as a "microsoft ballpoint device" or something (i dont remember the exact name). It turns out some microsoft crappy kludgehardware that they were for some ununderstandable reason producing a while ago, are just the same bridge based simple serial port stuff (to fool people to buy new computers with usb 1.1 to be able to use it).

Ok moaning mode OFF
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