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MC
Account closed
Registered: Jul 2009
Posts: 71 |
music-assembler
Any of you ever used it?
I am partly responsible for its existence.
Together with OPM who lived next door from me at the time (we lost contact) we decided after ripping lots of game tunes by Rob Hubbard and Martin Galway that we could do better technically.
We created a player routine which could play good sounding music based on tracks, sequences and presets (like hubbard's routine) minimizing RAM usage but without having big peaks in rasterline usage. The trick was working around the waiting stuff that had to be done with the SID or otherwise it wouldn't trigger. We accomplished this by having the player think ahead and make decisions for the next time the interrupt would be triggered. This routine would later become the music-assembler player code. The rest is history.
The two of us created the player routine, OPM was responsible for the track editor and I did the sequence and preset editors. We contacted Markt+Technik who also published some magazines in Germany and we had a publishing deal. They sold quite a large number of copies to my surprise at the time. I think I was about 17 years old or something back then.
I've read there were later 'updated' versions of our 1.0 release by Triad. Can anyone tell me what they changed/improved? I haven't seen a C64 in decades.
Cheers,
Marco Swagerman a.k.a. MC/DusaT
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Stainless Steel
Registered: Mar 2003
Posts: 966 |
Marco Swagerman woah! I still frequently listen to "Still rolling" "rollerboard" and "ode to rob".
Great work dude and musicassembler rocked hard. And rockmonitor of course too :D
BTW, a count of all SIDID's matching music assembler comes up with a number around 5181 hits. Might be more i'm not sure if my hvsc version is the most recent.
Unfortunately SIDID doesnt seem to be able to tell Rockmonitor and Soundmonitor apart.
And yes, i have made some tunes in Music Assembler aswell but eventually switched to SDI years later. Still MA was a great editor for its time.
In my book one of the persons who really shined with it most was Reyn Ouwehand. Also Image did some really nice tunes with it aswell.
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MC
Account closed
Registered: Jul 2009
Posts: 71 |
I've heard of this "hard reset" but am not acquainted with it. What exactly does it do? |
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Angel of Death
Registered: Apr 2008
Posts: 211 |
I'm no expert on this. But it has to do with the ADSR generator in the SID chip. As I understood it isn't very good, causing waveforms not to start exactly at volume zero and ruining your attack. It was fixed in the later version 8580 (making it sound tighter and more controlled) but some amazing techno-boffins found a way how to tickle some registers and causing the ADSR generator to reset and restart completely. (hence the name hard-restart)
The resulting difference is truly amazing. And the only down-side seems to be an increase in processor time.
But anyone who actually knows what he is talking about is free to correct me. :) |
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Frantic
Registered: Mar 2003
Posts: 1648 |
as far as I know, the ADSR bug is equally present on the 8580. |
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iAN CooG
Registered: May 2002
Posts: 3198 |
Stainless: grab latest sidid.cfg
http://csdb.dk/release/download.php?id=118271
and use parameter -m to get different sub-versions of players for example in /MC dir you'll get
Last_V8.sid Music_Assembler
(Voice_Tracker_4)
Lets_get_ill.sid SoundMonitor
(DUSAT/RockMon4)
Rockmonitor_5_Intromusic.sid Dutch-USA_Team/MC
Vainqueur.sid SoundMonitor
(JamMaster)
We_Have_It.sid SoundMonitor
(MusicMaster_1)
and so on.
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Marauder/GSS
Account closed
Registered: Jul 2006
Posts: 224 |
ah the dutch usa-team in the house, kewl...and the good old music-assembler... (:
really liked that great editor/player and still have a (unreleased) jingle-maker somewhere on my old disks, which I did for Chris Ammermüller/Beatmachine in 1989/90...
Groetjes! |
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SIDWAVE
Account closed
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 2238 |
MC: hard restart fixed the ADSR bug in the SID.
a triangle f.ex /\, it should start on value 0, but it dont, it just continues. so you reset the oscillator by setting waveform 9 or 0 or someothers, and then wait a few cycles, then set the waveform to be used. The /\ will then for sure start at 0 every time.
it makes drums hard and snappy, not sloppy and failing as in f.ex a lot of ben daglish tunes, or the basses of david whittaker. |
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Stainless Steel
Registered: Mar 2003
Posts: 966 |
Quoting JanJanfailing as in f.ex a lot of ben daglish tunes I strongly disagree on the failing part. It's a matter of taste though :-D |
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Frantic
Registered: Mar 2003
Posts: 1648 |
@Jan: While oscillator reset is often included in hardrestart routines for the reason that you mention, it does not itself have anything to do with the ADSR bug (oscillator != ADSR). The ADSR bug is a bug relating to the internal counter of the ADSR generator. In some conditions, this counter will not never hit a certain value which determines when the release is supposed to start, after which is supposed to start counting downwards (the release), but instead continues to count upwards and upwards until the counter eventually wraps around. This takes longer time than hitting the release condition and then counting downwards, as it should, and hence the timing of the ADSR may become unstable once you trig the next attack since the internal counter is somewhere out there in outer space. It is hard to explain in more detail than this, and those who are interested and able to are encouraged to have a look in the source code for resid, which does emulate the ADSR bug.
Also, no delay is required to reset the oscillator as you claim here. Just flip the testbit on and off, and the oscillator will be restarted immediately. The ADSR stuff needs some time to ensure that the internal counter of the ADSR generator will be "normalized" though, something like one or two frames, depending on what ADSR values that are involved.
So, just to conclude.. what people calls "hard restart" is really two different things:
1. Taking measures to stabilize the ADSR counter.
2. Setting the testbit to restart the oscillator.
Number 1 is obligatory for something to be called "hard restart", but number 2 is not implemented by everyone. Good editors allows the user to choose if and how to do these things, since the sound will be different depending on how you do it (i.e. there is no single "right" way to do hard restart) and different ways of doing it will fit different kinds of sounds/instruments in different ways. |
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MC
Account closed
Registered: Jul 2009
Posts: 71 |
Aha that clears up things for me. Thanks for your replies lads. |
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