Little sound fx generator

[rax]

Hi all ,

For the "jetpac" game I decided to make a small sound effects editor. Unfortunately the capabilities of this type of sound are limited, and I'm not sure if it will work for me.

I haven't tested it completely, and there may be a bug I missed. I'm not even sure the interface is intuitive enough.

Тhe editor is not finished and functionalities like "save", "load", "print" are not done. I don't know when I will be able to finish it, given that I don't think it will work for me, so I'm publishing it as it is now.

But I think editor would help to better understand AY-3.

sfxgen-beta02.tap

(10.97 KiB) Downloaded 165 times

[Chema]

Nice. You remind me of Twiligthe... making your own Oric tools such as this

[coco.oric]

i've looked at youtube your tool
Nice one, to make some experiments

[ibisum]

Its cool! Are you going to add a "scan ROM for synth values" feature, like Twilighte added to his all those years ago? That was fun, stepping through the ROM binary, using it to seed the synth chip with values ..

[jbperin]

I downloaded and tried this tool and I must say that it is, IMHO, the most convenient way to experiment with the AY chip.
Thank you very much for sharing it with us.

I'm a bit surprised by:
- some channel volume values in some provided sound fx (values higher than 31 should not be relevant)
- envelop numbering strategy

But I find the interface is very ergonomic and handy. It clearly makes this tool a "must have" for sound designers on Oric.

PS: as for the capabilities of this type of sound, I'm currently working on a way to produce high quality PCM sample encoding/replayer based on viterbi algorithm.
It is based on the one provided here : https://www.msx.org/forum/development/m ... s-poor-psg
I'm almost done with the encoder and now need to write the replayer.
But as I'm very slow at work .. it might takes time before I finish it and then not sure it will be on time for the JetPac Game

[Chema]

It looks a lot like an advanced version of this, which I used to create the SFX in 1337, btw.

For anything more complex, you'll need a kind of a sound engine. I made a simple (even naive) approach for Oricium which I reused for Blake's 7. Maybe that could bring you ideas for something more advanced or usable...

[rax]

Thanks!

Its cool! Are you going to add a "scan ROM for synth values" feature, like Twilighte added to his all those years ago? That was fun, stepping through the ROM binary, using it to seed the synth chip with values ..

No problem:). Show me this feature.

I'm a bit surprised by:
- some channel volume values in some provided sound fx (values higher than 31 should not be relevant)
- envelop numbering strategy

I don't know. I guess even if the value is greater, only the bits ones that matter are taken.
I hope to see your sound engine soon

It looks a lot like an advanced version of this, which I used to create the SFX in 1337, btw.

For anything more complex, you'll need a kind of a sound engine. I made a simple (even naive) approach for Oricium which I reused for Blake's 7. Maybe that could bring you ideas for something more advanced or usable...

Yes, this is really an improved version of SDES2.dsk . I tried to work with it, but when I tried to activate the sound and noise channel, it always took me a while to calculate the value.

Indeed, these sounds that are generated are quite simple. A more complex sound engine is needed for me.

I looked at Oricium and Blake's 7 and saw the engine, but I couldn't figure out how values could be generated for it.

I'm working on another engine, but I don't know what will come out and whether something useful will happen.

[Chema]

I looked at Oricium and Blake's 7 and saw the engine, but I couldn't figure out how values could be generated for it.

That is probably because I made it for my own usage, and it is dirty indeed

I encoded all the values in .byt statements and used #defnies to ease things a bit, but I did that by hand... In fact it is not as hard as it seems, both the data format and the engine itself. The engine is, I admit that, full of kludges and patches and, most probably, bugs. My only intention was to have something simple and compact in memory (I needed that), sacrificing generality and features. But it can play small tunes which are a few hundred bytes in data, and also plays sound effects with priorities, so whenever you want to play an effect, the engine tries to find an empty channel and, if it does not exist, will take one with lowest priority or simply won't be played.

I know how rewarding is to walk a path by oneself, but if you are interested I can provide any information you want.

Cheers!

[Dom]

Downloaded and tried.
Very nice tool which should be very useful to games developpers.
The interface is , for me, enough intuitive
The AY ship offers so many possibilities of parmameters combination that introducing parameters only by hasard is not a good method imho.
That's why I found the "O" option very usefull to start from known noises to investigate the effect of slight changes in parametters around these.
Thanks a lot for this tool Rax !

[rax]

I know how rewarding is to walk a path by oneself, but if you are interested I can provide any information you want.

Thanks Chema,
Yes, indeed the path we follow is interesting and rewarding.

Thanks for the suggestion. A little extra information would be good to have. New ideas may appear, and someone else may be inspired to do something alternative

I have a few ideas, but I haven't realized anything yet.

[rax]

...

Thanks Dom,

I hope this little program is really useful to someone

[goyo]

I made a smaller tool like Rax's sound tool few years ago.
'r' key to make sound randomly
'd' to view data

gensound.tap

(16.97 KiB) Downloaded 159 times

[rax]

I made a smaller tool like Rax's sound tool few years ago.
'r' key to make sound randomly
'd' to view data
gensound.tap

Good sound generator. If I knew her, I wouldn't do mine .
I think channel A (low byte) is not working properly in your generator.

[ibisum]

rax/goyo: The idea of the "ROM sound collection" is that you scan the ROM for bytes, and use those bytes as values to be sent to the AY. Twilighte did this in one of his early sound tools, and it was delightful to go through the ROM and find strange and interesting sounds. If I recall correctly this was suggested as a technique for squeezing nearly-infinite sound effects into as few bytes as possible, since everyone had the sound-set (the ROM itself) already available.

I'll see if I can find his implementation, its been a while and I have tons of .TAP's to go through in my oric/synth/ folder ..

[iss]

...since everyone had the sound-set (the ROM itself) already available.

This is great idea but has a drawback in regard of compatibility i.e. Oric-1/Atmos have different ROMs .