The music engine Phaser developed by Shiru, has two tone channel engine with one channel supporting a sweeping phasing effect and the other channel has a square tone with a further channel of interrupting drums. Phaser is an awesome sounding sound engine that has to be listened to. It can really make the mono speaker bang out some awesome tunes, this all comes at a cost though, it takes a lot of precious memory.
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Integrating Tritone into Z88dk
The music engine Tritone developed by Shiru, has three tone channels with a further channel of interrupting drums. Tritone is a popular sound engine for a number of reasons, it sounds great, supports drums and multiple channels and has an XM converter. So far the only downside is that the music engine is larger and takes up precious memory, but you certainly could do worse for size.
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Z88dk Memory Visualizer
As a special free Christmas gift, here is a Z88dk Memory visualizer.
https://1drv.ms/f/s!Atc34t6eCvqj1F2CpsoCxKC_PU6r
Note this only works with an older version of Z88dk Version 1.10
Anything newer, it probably won’t work as the Z88dk team changed the map output.
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Integrating Squeeker into Z88dk
The music engine Squeeker developed by Zilogat0r is a 4 channel engine (engine with no data takes 210 bytes. This engine offers 4 tone channel, however does not support Drums. Continue reading “Integrating Squeeker into Z88dk”
Integrating Anteater into Z88dk
The music engine Anteater is a bit of a different beast, it’s about twice the size of Nanobeep somewhere around 280-300 bytes, but it packs a punch with louder volumes and a better bass.
In fact, I like this sound engine so much, I am using it for all of my beta test at the moment and that will probably carry over to the real game.
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Nanobeep Code
NanoBeep is the smallest music engine currently available and tiny it is coming in at 79 bytes long plus the music data and slightly smaller than the last engine we played with Huby (which was 100 bytes). Just as with Huby, you are not going to get impressively spectacular music. However, it does its job well and saves you on memory.
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Happy Thanksgiving
For those that don’t live in the USA, today is Thanksgiving. This is a holiday made official by Abraham Lincoln in 1863.
President Lincoln’s official release.
Making music with 1Tracker
The 1Tracker software available at http://shiru.untergrund.net/ is another powerful tracker. While the GUI is not as friendly as Beepola, it’s power is support of many different sound engines. I am not going to publish how to use 1Tracker nor cover most sound engines available. I am mainly going to concentrate on a few low memory engines in 1Tracker.
Using Beepola to create a song using the Huby engine.
The first engine I will be covering is the Huby engine. This is a tiny sound engine that will save memory in your game. Yes, the notes sound a bit tinny, but it works with certain songs and is a small price to pay for saving music.
First, let’s launch Beepola and OpenMPT and rearrange the programs so that you can see both programs at the same time. It’s transcribing time.
Continue reading “Using Beepola to create a song using the Huby engine.”
Z88dk and Sound engines
Z88dk can integrate music engines into its compilation process, but it requires a tiny bit of work to get the engine into your game.
Coding Adventures with the ZX Spectrum 