Posted By
Csabo
on 2016-01-07
17:49:30
|  If you enjoy listening to old-school...
If you enjoy listening to old-school music, check out Skoro's new YouTube video, featuring 2 hours of converted tunes!
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Posted By
Degauss
on 2016-01-08
17:49:30
| Re: If you enjoy listening to old-school...
Wonderful. Even from todays point of view, the wave-converters are pure magic.
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Posted By
Mad
on 2016-01-08
19:50:04
| Re: If you enjoy listening to old-school...
Didn't know there is something like waveconverter. All three sections sound fantastic.
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Posted By
MMS
on 2016-01-08
20:50:50
 | Re: If you enjoy listening to old-school...
I agree. When the very first time I heard a wave-converter on a simple Plussy, I almost fall down from the chair.
It sounded unbeliable well, despite it's limitation on upper frequencies.
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Posted By
Luca
on 2016-01-08
22:00:29
 | Re: If you enjoy listening to old-school...
Mad I would suggest to read those dedicated articles I wrote on Lone News 20 about the history of sound in the Plus/4 scene.
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2016-01-09
10:06:04
| Re: If you enjoy listening to old-school...
Yeah, waveconverters are definitely cool. If I had infinite time, I'd go back and disassemble them all, to see the code's progression. My suspicion is that it all comes from Wit's original 
For me TLC's freq converter takes the cake though. With correct settings, many of the originals sound incredibly good.
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Posted By
Luca
on 2016-01-09
12:19:44
| Re: If you enjoy listening to old-school...
Sometimes I get disappointed because I would be able to catalog all the known converters. E.g.: SLD Music Box, as you can read at $513F it uses a 3 voices version enhanced by CeeKay of the originally 2 voiced converter by Tarzan, as seen in the seminal demo Gomangani, which compares several of them. In later times, Matr-X performed an evolution in waveconverters, but we dunno if he used the same one or not.
Talking of Gomangani, now I see I was wrong when I'd believed to use Coby's digi in my old demos: gray borders raster is original Coby's code (like in the beginning of Coby TCL Mega), blue is the TCL version (like Tubular Bells II)!
I really, really would know more about that stuff! 
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Posted By
gerliczer
on 2016-01-09
13:44:07
| Re: If you enjoy listening to old-school...
Ah, yes! Wave-converters are really gems of "technology", but their resource hunger cannot be forgiven. Or is it the lack of resources in our machines? By the way, since Luca mentioned Coby TCL Mega, is it really loading the next part after the intro screen while playing wave-converted music?
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Posted By
Luca
on 2016-01-09
15:48:40
| Re: If you enjoy listening to old-school...
gerliczer no, it stucks that way forever, and nobody have seen what lies beyond 
Back from kidding, you have to press space after the drive light has come back off.
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Posted By
gerliczer
on 2016-01-09
17:08:20
| Re: If you enjoy listening to old-school...
Cool joke, but I'd really like to know if is actually loading something from the disk or just plays with the drive motor and LED?
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Posted By
MMS
on 2016-01-09
18:16:22
| Re: If you enjoy listening to old-school...
I checked the mentioned music demos. Music Hearing did nothing for my, just freeze.
Gomangani: For me by far the clearest sound produced Tarzan converter. As I listened to it, it sounded like 3 channels, but did not sound as if the music would came from a "box", but sounded surprisingly great, even comparable to original SID. What is the trick? Why not more widely used?
SLD music box contains few really nice tunes.
Gerliczer: probaly if we would have the 3MHz 6502 in +4 just mentioned in the other post, even within games we could have the resources to "do something" (animation, etc) + SID wave converter...
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2016-01-09
18:26:50
| Re: If you enjoy listening to old-school...
In terms of emulating the SID, I don't think there's too much difference between them.
The quality is directly linked to the speed; when it's playing, enter >FF00 into the MONITOR to see what it is. "Tarzan's new converter" in Gomagani is just running a lot faster than the others. At $29, it's twice as fast as the next closest one, and about 21KHz. You can only do that with the screen off. Otherwise there's no other magic trick (well, maybe it "cheats" by emulating less features of the SID, e.g. something like simplified ADSR, or not taking ADSR into consideration at all).
Edit: and to answer the above (I'm surprised this even came up), the loader in Coby TCL mega is actually loading (while playing wave-converted music). I mean we watched this back in the day on the real iron many times, plus you can easily verify it in YAPE.
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Posted By
Luca
on 2016-01-09
18:53:34
| Re: If you enjoy listening to old-school...
Coby TLC Mega: I really wasn't kidding: you must press space once the loading has ended! Just as written before the music plays.
MMS: Music-Hearing V1.0 is a playback utility, it loads original SID tunes once a new directory has been read, then place the right parameters, choose a way to play that and go.
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Posted By
siz
on 2016-01-10
06:11:25
| Re: If you enjoy listening to old-school...
If you guys are interested I can provide the sources for my wave (digi) converter. And no it's not derived from any other converters, I wrote it from scratch. Of course of an older (perhaps Doky?) converter to understand the theory.
TLC's converter can sound much better because it runs in zeropage and it allows much higher sample rate.
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Posted By
Luca
on 2016-01-10
08:23:58
| Re: If you enjoy listening to old-school...
We're interested for sure! Please send in what you have, both sources and compiled .prg. Did a quick check: we've collected several frq and wave converters along the years, I didn't expect!
Most interesting, is the choice of waves samples done along the different ones.
Edit: actually, even in TLC's most used Cool Convert, there's a text saying:"Thanx to Doky for the original program".
Edit 2: /Utility/FrqConverter and /Utility/WaveConverter software types anyone? ;)
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Posted By
Degauss
on 2016-01-19
14:22:43
| Re: If you enjoy listening to old-school...
Maybe somebody can help: There was a music disk which - i believe - used TLC's wave-converter routine. It ran at much higher samplerate with the screen turned off. I remember the sound was impressive. Anybody remembers this? Or some other demo with screen-off + high-samplerate?
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Posted By
Gaia
on 2016-01-19
15:08:23
| Re: If you enjoy listening to old-school...
The highest sample rate is provided by turning on the NTSC bit in $FF07 on a PAL machine (see my frq table posted a few days ago). Exactly 25% higher sample rate can be achieved this way but then again you run out of memory much quicker as well and the screen is all messed up. One such example is the first part of Digital Brainstorm from the MX peeps. Actually, it's a wave converter, though whose exactly I can not tell but for sure sounds better than average. And then there was one demo the name of which I've forgot and there you could turn on and off the borders (not the NTSC bit though) to choose replay quality.
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Posted By
Luca
on 2016-01-19
15:46:27
| Re: If you enjoy listening to old-school...
Degauss: some examples come to my mnd, but with no TLC's converters.
- Music Service uses the Delta's Digiplayer, and pressing Shift during playback results in a notable improving.
- The Little Music Box 4 by TPSH turns off the screen to NTSC actually, using a quite rare Rachy's digiplayer.
- The Deluxe Driver's series had shown improvements along all of its storyline. The very last in the row is Deluxe Driver V6.1, which uses off screen for a very clean digiplayer claimed to be a coop between Coby and Steve. Nonetheless, Deluxe Driver V5.0/Deluxe Driver V5.1 use a NTSC player coded by Rachy Coby and Band.
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Posted By
Degauss
on 2016-01-19
16:24:53
| Re: If you enjoy listening to old-school...
Awesome. Thanks!
(My memory tricked me. it was the delta-player i remembered)
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