Negative Charge

@RamtopR Awesome! Can’t wait for this to be available.

I put together a short video as a demo of the new sound cartridge I'm working on for the Acorn Electron and BBC Master. Still lots to do, but it's coming along nicely now. youtube.com/watch?v=JeNx-O…

negativecharge.bsky.social - See you over there!

Still working slowly on the BBC Micro Music Driver. Just about to add in SWRAM support. The player now loops correctly through all tracks on disk, so not too far from putting this up on GitHub. FYI - I'm slowly migrating over to 🦋 - @negativecharge.bsky.social

I've updated the BBC Micro music driver and player to have similar capabilities as the Acorn Electron version... track looping, on-screen controls, restart track etc. Just need to add some vu-bars and add in multi-part tracks/SWRAM support and I'll release to GitHub.

@knelf It is, and you can: #p357852" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtop… It’s emulated in Elkulator, and I’m looking into creating a driver for it.

@charge_negative nice work but alas poor elk is a little starved on audio capabilities... I sometimes wonder if it would be possible to add in the chip from the BBC to it

How about a bit of Unreal II by Purple Motion on the Acorn Electron? (albeit with no volume control, limited frequency range, no noise channel and only a single tone channel)

A bit more progress on the Acorn Electron music driver and player. Added keyboard controls for advancing through tracks, and some placeholder graphics. I thought I'd try converting a few demoscene tunes. This one isn't too bad for a single channel device with no volume control

A few more updates to the Acorn Electron Music Driver. I've created a basic header for the file format to store track info, and allow the driver to auto-detect playback speed. Here's something that's missing from the Elk version of Elite. Maybe I can hack this into the loader.

More Acorn Electron experiments... I've switched to an IRQ1V interrupt handler and can switch the register printing back on. Playback tempo is more predictable. Here's a new conversion of the first track I converted to the Elk several years ago. At 100hz it's an improvement.

Another Acorn Electron experiment... a 100hz conversion of the C64 SID - Cybernoid II. It's a little rough currently. I've disabled the register printing as it impacts playback and needs optimizing (as does the streaming decompressor). If only the Elk had a 1kHz interrupt...

A correction on what’s shown in the video - Into Battle is actually composed by Shiru and stands head and shoulders above the other beeper tracks in that game.

Returning to the Acorn Electron, which was my first computer, I've written a converter for MS-DOS beeper music to the Electron's ULA. The ULA uses a simple counter for sound, and there's no volume control - what you're hearing is a single channel using arpeggios.

@Jameshhoward Thanks. Not yet, but soon. Some driver optimisation to do and improvements to the player… then I’ll package it up with the converter and stick it on Github.

@charge_negative This is great! Is the code for the converter/player available?

@andyinthecloud Thanks! I’m posting most of what I’m doing as .vgm files at the moment, which already contain a BBC Micro compatible register format. These can be converted for playback. I’ll get back to posting compiled albums in .ssd format at some point soon. github.com/NegativeCharge…

@charge_negative Loving all your doing! Any updates on when you might make some of these available on your website to be enjoyed on real hardware?

Random C64 SID to BBC Micro SN76489 Conversion Track: After Burner [from the arcade game After Burner II] Artist: Adam Gilmore (orig. Hiroshi Miyauchi) Year: 1988 #bbcmicro #sn76489 #commodore #c64 #sid

Some new music for the BBC Micro... a cover of Cocktail Hour by FADE made in Furnace by Abstract 64 (@64abstract). Here's the track running in a BBC Micro emulator. Had to convert to 15-bit LFSR / playback at 60Hz, but sounds great - listen to those drums at 30s, and that echo!

Another VIC-20 music driver ported to the BBC Micro so I can convert some more tunes - this time it's MOD2VIC. Track: A VICious Groove Artist: raphaelgoulart Year: 2015 #bbcmicro #sn76489 #commodore #vic20 #mos6561

I've managed to get the VIC-Tracker 2.0 driver running on the BBC Micro and have started converting a few .vt files (jumping through many hoops). It's not sounding right yet, but can post some examples soon. Meanwhile here's a great new track - Flow by Enfys from Evoke 2024.

I've now managed to get the VIC-20 Fisichella music driver by Aleksi Eeben running on the BBC Micro with some binary patching of registers, so can now convert some more tunes. Track: Easygoing Artist: Aleksi Eeben #bbcmicro #sn76489 #commodore #vic20 #mos6561

After a bit of disassembly and register address patching, I've got one of the VIC-20 music drivers running on the BBC Micro and capturing register writes. Next step is to get the driver to write directly to the SN76489. Eight Dollar Math - 4mat/Ate Bit #sn76489 #mos6561