Toni Westbrook dot Com

The Joy of Computer Science and Engineering

I've been working every night on this, but I haven't had time to update the blog until tonight. First off, I have notes done for 4 songs now, so 6 more to go. I've noticed that I've made every song I've done so far akin to hard/expert level on Guitar Hero in complexity, so I'm going to tone it down for the last 4 songs or so to more like medium level. Since you can't choose different levels, this at least gives a good mix of difficult songs and easier songs, and then if people want harder/easier for the other songs, they can simply make their own notes (and upload them for others :)).

Also, I quickly found out that the note editor still needed some design issues worked out. I found that unless I was dealing with a tricky part, it was actually easier to record at full speed than in 1/3X slow-mo, as in slow mode you're always hitting the button too soon, and its so slow you can't always tell if the sounds you're hearing are the actual note or just a weird effect before the note, or another note, just due to the way people generally craft SIDs to get lots of good sounds out of 3 channels. So I reversed the functionality of the whammy bar. When you're not pressing it, the song plays at full speed - the harder you press it, the slower the song goes. So fully depressed it goes at 1/3X slow-mo and half depressed its at 1/2X. Also - I found a constant need to wipe out all notes after a certain point - like, I would finish a section up, and the next section would start up, and I wouldn't be ready and I'd play notes waay off base and then I would need to delete 5-6 of them. So, I changed the functionality of the full-clear to clear past the current point. E.g. if I was at tick 5600 and I hit the Green,Red,Yellow and Blue and strummed up, it would delete any notes recorded after tick 5600 and restart the song. This still allowed me to use it as a full song clear - if I wanted to fully clear the song, I simply did this right when the song started, so everything past tick 1 was deleted. Double the functionality!

In PSX64 news, I have the plans into Eagle and I'm working out the two issues I was having - both (I believe, I need to wire up a test on a protoboard) are due to sinking lines off the atmega8 instead of floating them. We'll see - I'm looking to get it debugged and some safety features put on (i.e. diodes) and it put off for a prototype PCB printing asap so we can get some boards printed up. I suspect I will have the fixes and final plans done by this weekend, so I'll be putting the plans and firmware up soon for those handy with a soldering iron.

Lastly, with the game mere days away from "complete completion" (e.g. all the note data recorded), I've been readying both a nice wordpress version of this blog for more behind-the-scenes stuff as well as a beautiful site developed by my girlfriend Leah for Synthetic Dreams (since the current website is a bit lame). All plans, downloads (game and songs), and purchase info for the PSX64 will be available between those two sites within the next week or so. I hope everyone enjoys the game as much as I do!

I started recording note data tonight, but I quickly ran into a weird problem that I hadn't seen before, mainly because I hadn't previously been loading in so many songs (in the past I'd loaded in 4-5, now I'm loading in 10). Anyway, after a debug session of good length I found a just plain stupid mistake I'd made with pointer arithmetic - it happens to us all sometimes. The issue was I was saving high score data into the area of RAM where I'd copied the kernel into, and needless to say things weren't working right.

Anyway, fixed that and got the notes recorded for 1 song, 9 more to go. Most will be fairly easy to record for, but there are a few SIDs from the demo scene that will be a little more difficult. Hopefully it won't be too bad overall.

Okayyyy, so I added a little more in. I got more space by taking all the text for the credits screen out of the program and putting it onto disk, then writing a very lightweight loader for it to pop directly into screen memory. That freed up 300 bytes. I needed space as I wanted to add support for playing PAL SIDs on NTSC systems at the right speed and vice versa. Don't get too excited, it only works for SIDs that have the system speed specified in the file (which isn't all of them by any means), and it doesn't alter the frequency, only the playing speed. So NTSC users playing PAL songs will hear the song at a slightly higher frequency, but the song will still play the right speed (and the notes will go at the right speed). Not a big deal, but there were a few really great SIDs I'm including in the game that are PAL and have their system speed specified in the file, and they sounded so much better at their right speed, so it was worth it just for those (and future) SIDs.

So, I will be distributing a NTSC binary and a PAL binary of the game. They're the exact same thing except a few constants defined which allow what's mentioned above to work right. Again, this is only for a very small subset of SIDs, but at least its a help for those.