Tag: Neil Baldwin

  • Nijuu appeared

    niiju

    Neil Baldwin’s music engine for the NES has been released. More details can be found on website:

    Nijuu Index.

  • TCTD micronews for 2009-11-12

  • Duty Cycle Generator Niiju Updates

    I’ve been playing around adding some pseudo random features to Nijuu.There are already several commands that enable you to modify instrument parameters from within the sequence data but I wanted to expand that to give you the ability to modify other play-back parameters. This led to me adding commands that specify the RAM address of internal Nijuu variables so that they were exposed to real-time manipulation. This in turn led me to see if I could figure out a reasonable way to feed random numbers to these parameters and then expand that by giving the random numbers a range minimum/maximum value to make them more “useful”.I use inverted commas around “useful” as that description is still pretty debatable.

    via Duty Cycle Generator

  • Duty Cycle Generator – Single Channel Echo

    Neil Baldwin over at Duty Cycle Generator has added the ability in his sound engine “Nijuu” to add an “echo effect” to a single square wave channel.

    Echo Demo

    How it works is to have a circular buffer (one each for voices Square 1, Square 2 & Noise) that the echo writes to by figuring out what is going to get written to the PAPU (Pseudo Audio Processing Unit) registers each frame. It then captures the register settings and continues to do so until the buffer is filled, then starts again at the beginning. When you enable echo, Nijuu retrieves the values from the buffer and writes them to the PAPU registers in the “gaps” in between notes when it decides that there’s no activity on the voice (I do this by detecting if the ADSR envelope on the voice has reached the release phase or if there is no note playing). The echo feedback continues to loop around, attenuating the captured amplitude until it reaches zero. All the while, any new notes are captured to the echo buffer in the same way and it continues to capture/attenuate/feedback notes forever until you turn it off.

    (The above quote was taken from Neil’s article and slightly modified for accuracy.)

  • Duty Cycle Generator Update – Erik The Viking!

    After teasing it in past updates, Neil Baldwin reveals the secret Terry Jones project that never saw the light of day, a adaptation of the film Erik The Viking (perhaps the last enjoyable Tim Robbins movie?)

    Neil writes:

    We were producing the game for the now-defunct Japanese publisher, Video Systems and had pretty much completed the whole game. However, geographical and language problems made the testing and bug-finding phase frustratingly difficult. We were almost solely reliant on the publisher finding bugs/issues simply because there was only 4 of us trying to deliver this fairly large and complicated game and as we didn’t speak Japanese and they didn’t speak much English, it made for an interesting process. Even I had to get involved in map building and putting together trigger/behaviour scripts for the game’s events as well as writing all the music. It was all good fun though and the last version of the game that we submitted to the publisher was in great shape and actually good fun to play!

    …

    Luckily for you lot, I still had the music binary files and, with a little manual hex editing, managed to fashion it into a NSF file so even if you can’t see the game, you can listen to the music. I am far too good to you all :)

    via Duty Cycle Generator – NES Music by Neil Baldwin.