Posted By
TLC
on 2009-05-16
03:45:14
|  Re: TED Music Collection?
Hi guys!
Some cents... 
tune_01 might have been composed by Csabo.
I (myself) really only did two attempts to compose music in TLCPlay; one of them being the test tune supplied with the pack (covering Matt Gray's Hyperion intro tune), the other being a test tune (too) which AFAIK was not released but some of you might have had a listen to nevertheless (covers "It's a new day" by Viper; a rather miserable attempt to create some trance-ish atmosphere on a platform with no bass, poliphony, filters etc.). This second one might have been created in a slightly modified version of the player that has not been released (due to lack of interest or time -- I got my first decent job about that time, also implying that I had to move to another town -- or the fact that I simply didn't consider the modified structure worthwile, I don't remember now).
...So "my" tunes might be really easy to collect, by now...
As for the structure of the collection...
HVSID has been around for more than a decade. It should make a good start (as most of you had pointed out already). Those extra details dealing with backwards compatibility can safely be omitted; we're in the lucky situation of having the opportunity to learn from an evolved example... ...Keep in mind: HVSID originally supported DOS (silly 8+3 filenames) and Amiga (...back then, the PSID files were meant to be possible to play on an emulation engine ran by a 7.14 Mhz 68000... :o ). We don't have to deal with these details (as I guess) anymore.
I'd turn down to use an event-based fileformat (having seen a couple of bad examples lately). In the form István have suggested it might work well, though (I just don't see the advantage, other than the possibility to rip tunes easier -- which is also a drawback of some sort, as one would (in its simplest form) have to capture the tune data "interactively", which is a source of problems, if the goal is some kind of preservation of original tunes, just as they are).
As for the emulation engine...
Personally, I'd be happy to see a similar structure to libsidplay(2) and reSID (ie: separate emulation library and player). Keeping that structure means no obstacle to link statically, but creating a stand-alone player _with_ emulation code embedded makes it impossible to use the emulation engine from anything but the player UI.
...But István is probably much more aware of these things than I am.
Emulation: as opposed to the SID, the TED sound is pretty simple to emulate. It's _almost_ fully possible to emulate TED sound precisely on PC hardware. ...The real problem in emulating a SID is to emulate the analog functions that apply to mixing, DC levels here and there, response curves -- and especially the SID filter which is non-linear, and is especially hard to emulate in a faithful manner. In opposition to that, the TED sound is fully digital, and if there's anything that could make it "hard" to emulate, that is the sharp waves (rich overtones) it generates (that you can either deal with with digital filters well or not; but even if not, the most "unfaithful" effect you can get is either a lot of undersampling noise and/or muffled, overly filtered sound -- nothing really serious).
Ripping tunes...
Most true TED classics originate from the early, mid- to late '80s. That, unfortunately, is the time when no "real" sound systems were around (similarly to the early-to-mid-80's SID tunes). ...So, unlike today's players, it might be pretty hard to find and collect (and rip) some tunes from some particular games. (But this has been a phase HVSC went through, too... you might ask them about, say, David Dunn's routines )
István: regarding the question of entrance points of the player, that might pretty much match the structure seen in HVSC. There's an entry for init, an other entry that plays tune data and sounds, and a third one that merely updates the sounds alone (that way, one can create "multispeed" sounds without the burden of also having to update the tune).
SID+TED: just two concerns:
-- What should be with tunes converted from the C64, but not by some converter routines (so that they're in fact "native" by their current form? ). There were some conversions from Batya, Mucsi, maybe Pigmy; the guys effectively rewrote some parts in the original players, and corrected the sound data here and there, to get decent result.
...Probably this is the point where "cover" and "conversion" meet. As I guess, nobody has problems with covers (re-write of original tunes), and I'm also pretty certain that "conversions" are not needed here. But what should be with tunes that were 'converted' and modified, to play well on TED?
(This also has something in common with tunes created in Soundbooster, or Plus/4 Future Composer, for that matter (if there were any, that is)).
-- The possibility to play SID + TED tunes should be kept (as some of you had already pointed out). SID is not native to this platform, but SID+TED tunes (in that form) are. (The platform is pretty special in this respect; people were always desperately trying to make a SID machine out of the Plus/4, and although I personally don't like that that much by now, the SID certainly has place in this story... just my 2 cents).
|
