I have attached a disk image of the current incarnation of AYAY Kaeppttn to this message!Please also note that the pattern editor in fact does work, so you can go there, type in some notes (and use different instruments) and have a listen to the different instruments / sounds AYAY can produce
And here's kind of a manual:
First there are some global keys that work in each of the modes:
TAB - to switch modes (see below)
ctrl Y - toggle AY music playback
If enabled, you'll hear some normal AY music on channel A that you can jam to or modulate.
This is also very basic yet. In later versions, this AY music will be generated from any of the
AY channels / patterns you can create and will either be mixed with the Sid voice or modulated by it.
(note! this does currently not work as described as I was in the progress of writing the code that plays AY music from the patterns!)
DEL - turn of all sounds (useful if you have AY music on)
shift + cursor up / down - decrease / increase octave (from 00 to 07). There is a small bug here
that sometimes makes you keep stuck in octave dec/inc. Try shift + cursor key again to break free.
shift + cursor left / right - previous / next instrument. You have only 13 hard-coded instruments
currently (00 to 0c) and there's no way to create new ones yet. When you change instrument, the 4
tables below will display the new instruments start position in each of them.
French keyboard will probably act funny on some of the keys :-P
There are 3 modes which can be changed hitting the tab-key (the cursor will jump to reflect that):
1. Parameter mode (top of the screen) - here you can change the instruments parameters directly
The only keys you can use here (apart from the global ones) are the cursor keys to move left or right
and to decrease / increase the current value.
The 5 parameters you see are: target AY register and offset / vibrato / waveform / volume tables offsets.
You'll see what it means when you toggle instruments. Useful AY registers are 8 to 10 (for the 3 voices),
all others will only yield funny noises or nothing.. Except for the ones needed for Sync Buzzing in later
incarnations of AYAY.
2. Instrument mode (middle area) - here you can edit the different instrument tables
Use the cursor keys to wander around the 4 tables. Each table has 2 columns, an index and the
value at that index, separated by a colon. On the waveform column, you will also have the current
waveform drawn to the right. Valid values here go from 15 to 38
The values might look a bit weird.. But it's just unsigned hexadecimal stuff.. Everything between 00
and 7f is positive, FF to 81 is negative (and FF means -1, FE is -2 and so on). 80 is a special value
meaning jump to the index that comes in the next row (i.e. 80 followed by 03 will cause a jump to
position 03 in that table). This might look complicated at the first sight, but it is very flexible and
(which is important to get decent audio quality) also very fast in the player.
Use ctrl + cursor up / down to change the current value. Press ENTER to enter 2 hexadecimal
digits as the new value (useful to enter jump (jp) commands, which are at value 80) or ESC to cancel.
Press space to use the current position (the one thats on the left side of the colon) in the current table
for the current instrument, i.e. when you are on position 5 in the vibrator table, pressing space will
set the 3rd value of the instrument params to 05.
3. Pattern mode (bottom area) - you will be able to edit patterns here. This one is not finished yet,
so I won't go into detail here now.. I hope to get some more functionality done .. soon ..
All of the work flows are just in-progress and beta and so on. Apart from how the instruments and
the 4 tables work - it's unlikely that this will work differently. But I am sure it's possible to make editing
a lot easier than it is now.
I am curious to hear what you ppl think (or should I say you one guy that took part in the discussion so far?) about it.