Music compilation "Nightshift" released

[mr_lou]

Hello all


Attached is a little music disk with 11 tracks done by me.
Artwork by my girlfriend BlueAngel, code by Kevin aka arnoldemu, and catart by tastefulmrship.

Enjoy.

[alex76gr]

Beautiful demo!

Thank you very much!

[Optimus]

Wow. Great main screen. Nice interface.

[Devilmarkus]

Great tunes and cool interface!
(Is there a bug? Cannot turn back to tune #0?!?)

Anyway: Cool prod!

[Devilmarkus]

Ok: Bug is like this:
On regular number keys I cannot turn back to Tune 0, on Numberpad keys, it's possible...

[arnoldemu]

Ok: Bug is like this:
On regular number keys I cannot turn back to Tune 0, on Numberpad keys, it's possible...

yes, it is a bug.

Some info about this demo:

1. it recognises azerty keyboard, so you can press A on azerty keyboard and it works
2. runs on 64k machines
3. both f keys and number keys can be used (excluding 0 because of a bug)
4. it uses some firmware functions
5. function . can be used instead of 'A'. (or should be useable this way

[tastefulmrship]

Top job! Great music. Great graphics. Great coding.

It's a shame the CATart sucks so bad! Fire your CATartist! ^_^

[TFM]

Agreed! Nice prod!!!

[MacDeath]

It's a shame the CATart sucks so bad! Fire your CATartist! ^_^

schizos are never alone...



good production, i think i should give it a try on a real machine.

[mr_lou]

Thanks to all for the positive feedback. I don't consider this little production anything big. It's just a little contribution to give something back to the community.

I should tell you, many of the tracks will only sound correct on a real CPC.

I've been meaning to record all the tracks to mp3 files too, but there are just too many things stealing my time these...years....
If anyone out there is bored enough, feel free to create mp3 files from the tracks - but only if recorded from a real CPC.

[arnoldemu]

Thanks.
Mr.Lou and Blue did all the hard work with the gfx and musics.
Mr.Lou asked me to make it more "alive" so I coded some animations and some transitions.
It was a bit harder work because it runs in 64k, uses overscan, and doesn't use double buffering.

[MaV]

Very nice graphics and sound! The animation and the shifting of the menu makes for a good effect; beautiful CATArt!

I've listened a couple of times to the songs, and I like Bloodstains best. That one has a touch of John Carpenter's 80s soundtracks, IMO.

[MacDeath]

Ok, tried it on real CPC.
The desktop is very nice.

but i regret that there is no more mdoern options such as fast forward or back stuff...
like +5second, -5 second read, or something to tell where you are in the song, or are they in loop ?

Also a pause button, shuffle and so on.


But it could get bigger to code...


BTW, it would need that I put a proper stereo specker/sono on my CPC, the built-in speaker is far too old and shitty for this...

[arnoldemu]

Ok, tried it on real CPC.
The desktop is very nice.

but i regret that there is no more mdoern options such as fast forward or back stuff...
like +5second, -5 second read, or something to tell where you are in the song, or are they in loop ?

Also a pause button, shuffle and so on.


But it could get bigger to code...


BTW, it would need that I put a proper stereo specker/sono on my CPC, the built-in speaker is far too old and shitty for this...

I used standard starkos player.. this gave me start and stop only 

next time I could code other features... if I want to.

[Devilmarkus]

if I want to.

[mr_lou]

Pouet link:
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=59249

[mr_lou]

Hm, I have just discovered that someone with the nick porno-UZI done some mp3 capturing of Nightshift - in a very poor quality, that makes all the tunes sound very different. Clearly not recorded from the a real CPC.

He has posted the link in a comment at Pouet. Anyone signed up at Pouet, please help me get rid of that link again and kindly inform porno-UZI thanks for trying, but it's terrible.

When I get my CPC+ in the near future hopefully I'll be able to make some mp3 versions of my tracks. My current CPC464 gives too much noise on the line I think.

(And please do not turn this into a why-don't-you-register-yourself debate. I have too many logins to annoyingly remember already. It's always "just one more site, come on").

[TFM]

... I have too many logins to annoyingly remember already. It's always "just one more site, come on").

Well, here at FutureSoft labs we found an solution for this. Take one of your computers and make a file that contains data sets of:
- homepage
- ID
- PW

You can do that with Protext on CPC or with Notepad on every PC. I tried it and it works great. Now I can login to everything (except pouet net, because this seems not to be very CPC related...imho).

[Gryzor]

Can't believe it took me so long to listen to this one. Top notch! I love the presentation (what? No graphic equalizer? ) and the tunes are so nice, too! Damn, I wanted to play some Totems but I've been listening to it for the past half hour...


Thanks!

[ralferoo]

At pouet, you can't even edit your own posts. You could maybe ask an administrator to remove the link but I've never heard of that happening. The best thing to do is just upload a better quality version - even though it's on the first page, pouet always shows newest first, so a replacement link would probably be see first.

If you do have a better version, you can get an admin to add it to the links at the top of each page in any case.

[ralferoo]

Clearly not recorded from the a real CPC.

I've got to ask about this... I'm wondering about this because you've mentioned something very similar to this before (but maybe on IRC)...

I'm wondering if what you're after is the tinny sound from the rubbish speaker in the 464. Because I agree that I think the sound of the 464 seems to make the bassy notes sound a bit nicer compared to emulators, I wonder if the lineout from the CPC wouldn't give you closer to the sound from emulators.

[mr_lou]

No it is not the tinny sound I'm after.

Emulators will sound like the CPC464 if audio was played on a similar speaker.

A real CPC can play through good speakers, just as an emulator can. So the sound in that relation is not the issue.

But (most) emulators just don't play back the Starkos tracks properly. That's my problem.

[ralferoo]

But (most) emulators just don't play back the Starkos tracks properly. That's my problem.

Message me on irc next time you're on, it'd be good to get to the bottom of this to find out exactly what's going on.

I'm wondering if it's the way emulators do the volume levels on the chip. It seems most emulators have volume tables that come from voltage measurements on a speccy that deviate substantially from the "correct" values on the datasheet for the AY8192.

I know my implementation implements the volume levels as 1-bit PWM using the values in the datasheet and a capacitor for a low-pass filter, so I'd be interested to know if that sounds more real... if so it's probably a strong indicator that the real AY does also use 1-bit PWM instead of a DAC for each channel. Incidentally, I got to my design in an effort to minimise gate chip which would have been a serious concern on chips from that era - my implementation is about half the number of gates compared to the fpgaarcade version, for example, so I suspect it's more likely to be closer to the original.

But it'd definitely be good if I made some recordings of some tracks you know well and got your opinions on them and maybe try different things with them to get them to sound closer to what you want...

[mr_lou]

The volume tables is one of the issues yes, but not all. More advanced tricks in modern trackers such as STarKos isn't played back correctly on emulators.

I can hear instantly if one of my own tracks sound wrong. So you can record e.g. Nightshift if you want.

[TFM]

How is JavaCPC doing? IMHO its sound emulation is very well done.