Microhertz

Monday, 13th February 2006

They say that pictures are what make a journal interesting... but I don't really want to show the pretty pictures I have, as they'd spoil the surprise. Of what, you might ask? Well, I've been developing a TI-83/83+ scene demo, entitled "Microhertz" (for no particular reason). You can download it (and some screenshots, if you really must!) here.

Things have been very busy - a new Latenite beta, riddled with all new exciting "features" (*cough*), has been released... I'm slowly fixing them as and when I can smile.gif
It's a bit rubbish for debugging - you can start, pause, and stop a debugging session, but that's about it. Hopefully it won't be too long until I get around to actually sorting out all the debugging gubbins, but I'd rather get the main IDE and the primitive debugging more stable first.

One other TI project I'm working on is updating QuadPlayer. I have a 1.1 version which can play songs from the archive as well as RAM, has a loop function and other little fixes and tweaks. To complement it, I've written a simpler script for creating your own songs, a better Windows-based player for testing (which simulates QuadPlayer's internal sound generation system and has accurate timing) and (best of all) am working on a program that takes PSG VGM files (BBC Micro, Sega Master System &c) and converts them to QuadPlayer songs. So far, any songs that do "exciting" things - vibrato, for example - end up sounding horrible in high octaves (I'm having to limit 10-bit to 8-bit periods), but I have some very decent sounding QuadPlayer files based on Sega VGMs. Some songs use lots of short, fast notes - which sounds great on dedicated hardware, but when you have a delay as QuadPlayer stops outputting a square wave to fetch the next note, sounds crap.

Finished the levels! Wahey!

Wednesday, 7th September 2005

...and here is level 6. This, however, worries me:

egads.gif

Hopefully I can cram in all the rest of the code, tables, graphics and music into 5K. Failing that, I might have to start compressing my levels...

I don't believe I've introduced you to my enemies yet? Here's the complete sprite table - don't worry, the letters P, A, U, S, E and D do not feature as enemy craft!

sprites.gif

I spent some time adding a new command systen to QuadPlayer, so you can now set a song to loop back X times (or infinitely) to a particular spot. It'll only loop from the end, sadly. Nested repeats will be too evil to try and implement. I'd like to experiment more with white noise - maybe a command to set up certain channels as being white noise rather than tones? Not sure how I'd generate the white noise, as the register R (which is the source of my random number generators) isn't going to be very random if accessed in a short loop!

Sample song, from a Kirby game (I added the fade at the end manually, that's not produced by the calculator!) Not bad, seeing as it has been generated by a calculator with no proper sound hardware. smile.gif

QuadPlayer - four channel sound from a TI-83 Plus

Monday, 18th April 2005

No longer are we limited to two channels of sound, but here we have access to four!

gui.gif

If you have a TI-83 Plus calculator, there's a preliminary release here - and if you don't, some zipped up MP3 recordings here.

(Topic on MaxCoderz).

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