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Posted By

Murphy
on 2023-04-13
02:44:59

Re: Revision 2023

Thanks! Yes, I lose half of the double clock mode because of the extra 56 pixellines.

By the way, there is a debug mode in musicdisk. You can activate it with D, and then hold shift to show the CPU usage of the actual music.

Posted By

MMS
on 2023-04-12
13:16:24

Re: Revision 2023

@Murphy
Thank you for all the technical details! Although I see those elements, I did not expect that they take so much rastertime. Really well done, no vibrations of slow-downs noticeable.
Well, regarding the very colorful scroll text I already tought, that it could be more tricky than usual.

BTW you did not mention, but AFAIK extending the border slows down the CPU, as Litwr told beforehand.
So doing all those raster tricks done on a Plus/4 behaved slower than usual (there are less "TED free" rasterlines). But we could not notice anything from that.
All in all, this picture + scroller looks really fancy and the musics are superb!

Posted By

Luca
on 2023-04-12
09:54:08

Re: Revision 2023

IRQ fighters FTW!

Posted By

Lavina
on 2023-04-12
09:52:00

Re: Revision 2023

wow! Interesting read about all these marvelous code solutions. There's always more to it than it meets the eye.

Posted By

Murphy
on 2023-04-13
02:47:52

Re: Revision 2023

I tried to smile friendly.

My goal is to communicate that here you are seeing the TED Vibes #2 musician recruitment list.

From the technical side, TED Vibes has three interesting features.

1. Since not all music can fit in the memory at the same time, I load the music, and a fifo cache algorithm is also built in. I have room for about 8 compressed music in the memory at the same time, and I always throw away the oldest one when I need space for a new one. I want to improve on this algo later, but it still loads 1-1 music very quickly. I recommend everyone to use Bitfire because it is fast and easy to work with. Thanks bsz and Bubis!

2. Since the program thread is reserved for loading and decompressing, all functions had to be implemented from IRQ. This was an interesting challenge because opening the border (the image is 160x256 pixels), updateing the scroll and playing 8x music requires 13 precisely placed IRQs.

So, there is no area on the screen where I have more than 39 free raster lines at once, and there are places where it is much less. If I were to wait longer than this in any IRQ, the next IRQ would not be able to be called, and the screen or the music would break up. (In the end, by the way, the 8x music was not included in the music disk, but the code was made for that).

Because of this, the code had to be added with a kind of multithread thinking, because there are parts of the code that consume much more CPU than 39 rasterlines. The animations, the scrolling of the tracklist (which is more than one frame), but even the music playback could conflict with the next IRQ.

For this reason, I placed cli in 4-5 places in the IRQs before the lower priority routines. So that, if necessary, the next IRQ can be called while the CPU has not yet completed the previous one. e.g. When playing a 4x music, the 4th player call is interrupted by the next IRQ at the top of the scroll for more than one raster line. There is also a situation where 3 IRQs overlap each other. It really just needed attention, but I don't think it would be a very common solution.

3. And the third is the lower, colored scroll, which is much trickier than it seems at first.

The problem is that if you switch $ff07 to 38-character mode, the border color appears in the two outermost character positions. This was not good for me because the border and background colors are different.

Therefore, the edge masking had to be manually emulated. So I scroll smoothly with $ff07, but the screen remains 40 characters wide, and the two outermost characters are always modified by the CPU so that the scroll movement is not visible at the edges.

Posted By

Luca
on 2023-04-11
19:23:19

Re: Revision 2023

@Murphy saw the snapshot but ain't able to caught the response you cited

Btw: yes I would like to read about technical stuff behind it.

Posted By

Murphy
on 2023-04-11
18:44:26

Re: Revision 2023

Thanks for the feedback, I'm glad you like it.

A little background story about TED Vibes so you can understand how it was created.

The basic concept came from the fact that I accidentally came across a TED music by Tobikomi on YouTube. I really liked it. And around the same time I was chatting with Chabee and he said he'd love to write more TED music. Then I searched on YouTube, later on BOTB and HVTC, and I found some more exciting music from Kleeder, FADE or Navidon1147... All of them have already written very good TED music, and I had never heard of them.

The plus/4 scene is quite closed, it has few connections with other scenes, meanwhile there are such talented musicians who are active at TED, and almost no one knows about them.

I wanted to change this a bit. It was also my goal to make TED music more accessible to other musicians, so I decided to request the music project files from each composer and release them with the TED Vibes zip.

This is where the idea came from to make a musicdisk with musicians who have already written music for TED, but are not known, and to find people who are very talented and who are also happy to experiment with new platforms. Let's see what they do with the sound of TED. And if only a few people from the real plus/4 scene are involved, the surprise factor will also be greater. :)

I didn't have time for a bigger project for the Revision anyway, so this seemed like a good release idea.

First, I made a simple prototype from musicdisk and put in a lot of exciting plus/4 music from HVTC to have something to look for the musicians as a reference.

Also, I looked at all the active musicians of the retro scene, from ZX spectrum to Atari ST. Then I selected them into 3 lists based on their previous releases so far.

1. it is almost certain that they will say yes
2. there is a relatively high chance that they will say yes
3. it would be great if they would say yes, but I wouldn't bet on it

About 1.5 months before Revision, I started looking for musicians with the prototype and a small project docs about the TED Vibes and the plus/4.
In the first round, I started looking for people from lists 2 and 3 to see how the participant list was developing.

The goal was 12-15 tracks, but the project was much more unpredictable than I first thought. There were no replies to my emails and PM messages for weeks. And several musicians refused the invitation. Some had little time or refused for other reasons. Others did not respond because they did not check emails or social media. There was also someone whom I contacted on 3 different channels before I managed to communicate with him. I received answers from several musicians only with the help of a mutual acquaintance.

So the whole project was quite a rollercoaster, because it wasn't very clear where exactly I was in the recruitment of musicians. There were those who wrote a reply email after a month, and some who answer to me after 1.5 month, on the first day of the Revision.

Also some people wrote that they didn't have the energy for it right now, and then later still sent music.

When several people answered that they didn't have enough time, I decided that the surprise factor was less important, so I reached Csabo and 5tarbucks from the "I'm definitely counting on them" list to make sure there were enough composers. Then, on the same day, two other people responded that they would also write music for the project.

By the way, at the end of March, it was still an open question whether there would be 9 or 16 songs in the final release.

Then several people didn't send music in the end, but I received more then one from others.

Overall, TED Vibes was 70% project management and 30% coding.

I decided relatively quickly that I would make a sequel to the music disk, because I received quite a lot "not good right now, but I'd love to make a try later" comments. Anyway, I contacted 17-18 people in total.

In response to @Luca's last sentence, I attached a screenshot from my recruitment board after the first TED Vibes released.

https://share.getcloudapp.com/L1uD9E54

By the way, the musicdisk is also interesting from a technical point of view, I would be happy to write about it if there is interest.

Posted By

MMS
on 2023-04-11
16:48:35

Re: Revision 2023

@Luca
You are 100% right: TedSound is absolutely unique and you can recognise it at first "sight".
I know square sound is not THAT special, but somehow TED sound has it's special characteristique you can recognise at once. Could be simulated on SID with their best efforts

Posted By

carrion
on 2023-04-11
08:14:44

Re: Revision 2023

Congrats to @edhellon and @Murphy and all involved. Great productions. Now I have appetite for want more

Posted By

Luca
on 2023-04-11
07:15:13

Re: Revision 2023

The Plus/4 Revision's releases plus the fantastic addon of the extensive explained VolBass are nothing less than totally fantastic! Congratulations to all the great guys involved in those unbelievable projects! Clearly I casted votes anywhere they've been archived!

@edhellon beg your pardon to have missed the very last test on the real machine due to my being away from home, anyway as we said, at that point the intro was in a safety zone beyond any suspect of flaw. And you all won!

@Murphy TED Vibes represents a sort of milestone to be noted and remembered, as I feel inside this project the challenge to promote the TED sound as a proper Micromusic device (I remember I had the chance to chitchat about Micromusic with Csabo recently, too...). I myself attempted to break this cultural barrier years ago, presenting a C16 tune in a generic music compo, so you can value how important is for me to see a stunning product like TED Vibes presented in a big party!
What a pity I didn't get picked up to join the musicians' roster! But I'll do my best in the future, in order to improve my TEDsound skills and reach a good level of quality in order to match those long running TEDsound composers

Posted By

Rachy
on 2023-04-11
02:44:05

Re: Revision 2023

Nice work, guys!

Posted By

Ati
on 2023-04-11
00:39:51

Re: Revision 2023

Congratulations guys!

Posted By

MMS
on 2023-04-10
19:32:00

Re: Revision 2023

Congrats, Guys! Thanks to the fantastic quick uploads I was lucky to enjoy these two releases in such a short time.
The musics were great, the animated hamster was super cute and the Chromatic was a visual masterpiece!
Thank you All!
(and we should really skip the opinion of C64 fanboys - it was never Plus/4's aim to compete with C64, but to compete with ZX Spectrum. 2 channels is more than one beeper, and still, from the one beeper some guys could create fantastic music)

Posted By

5tarbuck
on 2023-04-10
16:16:33

Re: Revision 2023

I understood "Dogshit"...

Well, the TED Chip isn't a musical masterpiece, but it doesn't deserve that label. I'm happy about every single song on TED Vibes. Every musician involved has shown that the TED chip isn't as shitty as its reputation suggests. And 9th place out of 24 isn't that bad

Posted By

BSZ
on 2023-04-10
16:07:42

Re: Revision 2023

Congratulations to all the plus/4 (and other) competitors! It is good for the world to see that there is something other than the old retro machines we know!

@Lavina: Did someone have something clever to say?

Posted By

Lavina
on 2023-04-10
06:48:54

Re: Revision 2023

Honestly what I did not like about the party were the commentators making bad jokes about the sound chip of the Plus4, calling it "dumbsh1t" and even saying the Plus4 is worse than the C16... :-/ Someone should enlighten them.

Posted By

Chronos
on 2023-04-10
06:33:28

Re: Revision 2023

congrats guys for the releases!

Posted By

Lavina
on 2023-04-10
06:45:03

Re: Revision 2023

wow Chromatic Distortion is mind blowing as well. Congrats for this release and for the 1st place in the compo!!

Glory to the Plus4!

Posted By

mono
on 2023-04-10
03:03:49

Re: Revision 2023

Thanks a million for TED Vibes! Great music collection!

Posted By

MMS
on 2023-04-09
15:39:04

Re: Revision 2023

oooh, due to travel I missed the Oldskool stuff...

(I hope there will be an archive I can check latewr).

Posted By

Lavina
on 2023-04-10
06:45:28

Re: Revision 2023

TED Vibes !!! Congrats to Murphy and all the brave musicians riding our square waves!!!

Posted By

Murphy
on 2023-04-05
11:55:45

Re: Revision 2023

Unfortunately, I won't be going in the end, but I heard about two upcoming plus/4 releases.

Posted By

siz
on 2023-04-03
06:44:39

Re: Revision 2023

@Lavina: I'll attend this year. There are 2 free places in my car if You change your mind.

Posted By

Lavina
on 2023-04-03
03:01:27

Revision 2023

https://2023.revision-party.net/

It turns out that some of our sceners are actually going to attend the party this year. Maybe it'd better to know this about each other. It was planned that I would also go but it will not happen as it seems now.