On 8/13/05, B. Watson <atari@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Fri, 12 Aug 2005, Doug Dingus wrote:
>
> > I did this long ago on the 8bitters. It's true @ 60Hz you will hear it.
> You
> > hear it up to fairly high frequencies. What happens is the ear
> translates
> > these into extra notes or it's heard as a pitch shift happening rapidly
> if
> > the frequency is low enough.
>
> I was afraid of something like that...
>
> However... if I'm shifting at 60Hz, what's the extra note being heard?
Actually you hear a coupla things. You get the 60Hz note, plus this wierd
updownupdownupdownupdown pitch. 60 isn't fast enough to blend, so you hear
both rapidly next to one another. (It's a cool effect, but not really
musical.)
A
> 60Hz tone? What if I use a tuning where 60Hz is an in-tune note (it's
> between a B flat and a B... I used to know a guy who tuned the B on
> his guitar to the 60Hz hum coming out of his crappy amp, and the rest
> of the guitar to that... it was the only way to make music instead of
> noise come out of that amp).
LOL!! If it's all in key, it works!
Bleah. Even if that works, I wouldn't be able to play a normal
> bassline. The 60Hz B's would clash with anything else in the bass.
>
> > One thing that does work fairly well is to alternate the pitches every
> > cycle. --with some pattern, 112112112, 121212121, etc... Let each tone
> run
> > for exactly one cycle, then start the other one. I'm not sure the 2600
> has
> > the muscle to actually get this done however.
>
> Not every CPU cycle... could use a hard-coded string of STA/STX and do
> it every other cycle. Of course, that's *all* the 2600 would be doing
> (no graphics, no game...)
I don't think that would get it done either. The cycle time varies with
pitch. I pasted one cycle of one frequency in with another into an audio
editor, then copied that to build up a second or two of audio. Too many
timing problems at the 2600 speed. When I wrote cycle, I meant one audio
cycle, followed by the other one. CPU cycles just don't match up.
Hmm, Manuel was talking about volume-only sound for playing 4-bit samples.
> How often do you have to update the volume register to make anything sound
> halfway decent? If every other scanline is enough (60 frames * 262 lines,
> divide by 2 = 7860 samples/sec), I could imagine doing a simple game
> with sampled audio using a 2LK and LOTS of ROM banks for sound samples.
>
> ...time passes...
>
> Ugh, I just tried converting a song to 4-bit samples. Either I'm doing
> the conversion wrong, or 4-bit samples sound like everything's going
> through a distortion pedal.
>
> What I did was convert a song to 8-bit unsigned samples, then write
> a little C program that strips off the bottom 4 bits of each sample
> (PC sound cards don't support 4-bit samples natively, so I'm trying to
> simulate them that way). The 8-bit version sounds OK, and my stripped
> version sounds like utter crap.
>
> I know next to nothing about digital audio sampling... is there a smarter
> way to convert than just removing the bottom 4 bits?
The other posts have this exactly right. I would trim the audio a bit
farther below the limit however, but that's just me. You should be able to
get AM Radio quality sound (a good AM radio that is) out of a 2600 that way.
4 bits can sound fairly good actually.
I've a question along these lines. The 2600 has two 4bit audio channels
right? Using them both together could get more than 4 bits of sound. What's
the maximum audio output without distortion? When they add together, is
there room in the rest of the circut to handle both channels? I remember the
8bitters having some limit on the 4 channels. If the sum of the 4 was too
high, distortion would result.
--
> B.
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