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It’s a bit complicated in how I did it here, but the main technique I’m using here is something called SSG-EG. If you’re familiar with the AY’s envelopes, this is very similar. The biggest difference is that the envelopes are done with a full ASDR instead of just one value. This makes tuning a lot more difficult, but it gives a more flexibility with timbre. If you want a fuller explanation, I’d be happy to give one 😁

Kinda 😄 The original AY-3-8910 could do this same trick to a lesser extent. What’s actually going on is that I’m masking the envelope with a very high pitch pulse wave, so high pitch it’s beyond human hearing. Because of this supersonic masking, the envelope sounds quieter than normal. With a square wave, you can effectively half the volume of the envelope, but with multiple pulse widths, you can control the volume more freely

briys

I mean... You're not wrong... 😆

@@SpinningSquareWaves about what?

@@iwanttocomplain About the British inventing chiptune. Chiptune is kind of a fuzzy genre that can be defined in different ways. That makes it hard to point at one person or group and call them the inventor. Much like other music genres, Chiptune is something that has slowly come into being, changing with time as it's influenced by many different artists and genres. One could argue that someone like Martin Galaway or Tim Follin were the "inventors" of chiptune, in the sense that they invented many parts of what defines chiptune music, but that would ignore the earlier work in arcade games like Rally-X or Space Invaders (assuming you count the marching rhythm of the invaders as music). Or, maybe I'm overthinking a comment that I completely misunderstood ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@@SpinningSquareWaves make a 1bit chuptune then come back to me.

I made them using an obscure part of the hardware that lets me loop each operator's envelope, called SSG-EG. There are some downsides to this, namely the difficulty in tuning with ADSR values, but it allows for a lot of really cool sounds that wouldn't be possible otherwise. This song actually uses it for a lot of different things, from the chords and the vocals, to the drums and bass.

@@SpinningSquareWaves incredible work!!!

Thanks! It's not as bad as it used to be. I started making a big spreadsheet of different tunings I've found, which saves a lot of time. Unfortunately, the tuning doesn't carry between chips or different clock rates, so every other OPN series chip and variant needs to be tuned separately. And that's before considering the different timbres from different tunings 😵

Don't let that stop you! 'Cus we ain't stoppin

I'm glad! I'd love to hear what you can make :D

Do you mean Dezaemon for SNES? The bass in it's "editor music 1" is very similar. If I'm not mistaken, it's actually a pretty common bass sample used in a lot of other SNES games, like Earthbound and Super Mario World.

​@@SpinningSquareWaves Yeah, its similar

I hope so too 😄 I think Natt Akuma made a driver of sorts at one point, but from what I understand, it was designed with a specific purpose in mind and wasn't super flexible. Ssg-eg is just too complex, which is part of why it's so useful

Yeah, sorry about that. At one point, I'd meant to remake this video, but ButtonMasher's tutorial has effectively replaced this one. If you have any questions, though, I'd be happy to answer them :)

Yeah, it does get a little microtonal at times😅

That was dad

I'll take that as a complement :) The "asparagus" sample by itself is kinda large for SNES standards, at around 7K (7560 bytes)

True! Although, to be fair, the ssg-eg is doing a lot of work in this one

Yeah, it could have stereo since the SNES has soft panning, but I didn’t include any because the original song didn’t have any. I wanted it to be as close to the original as possible

True, but I'm not the first! I believe that title goes to Genatari, whose work partially inspired what I did here Also, nice profile pic :D

I mean, you're not wrong 😆

@@SpinningSquareWaves 😉

idk ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Maybe I was influenced by EDM I used to listen to, but that wasn't intentional

​@@SpinningSquareWaves probably a mix of the vocals being almost just vocals without text and the track being quite upbeat

Honestly, I would love to, but I'm not sure if I will. Game dev on its own is pretty daunting, and making games on the Genesis seems harder and less practical, by comparison. Maybe some day, but right now, that day seems distant 😔

So, the periodic noise doesn't need channel three to generate a pitch. On its own, it can generate three tones, which happen to be 'A' in three different octaves. Here, I just used that 'A' note exclusively

@@SpinningSquareWaves nice

Almost, yes! It’s important to note that channel 3 has a special mode that allows independent frequency control of the 4 operators. The other technique, ssgeg, does work on every channel. The biggest limitation for that isn’t tone complexity as much as it is tuning. Higher notes are usually more out of tune than they otherwise would be. But, overall, yes, 24 note polyphony is very possible on OPN2/YM2612 As for YM3812, the OPL2 doesn’t have ssgeg, so that technique isn’t an option. However, using additive mode and various multiplier settings does allow for 18 note polyphony, albeit with limitations in what those pitches can be. They need to be integer multiples of a base pitch less than 15 and not 11 or 13. OPN2 can do something similar to this with algorithm 7 using integer multiples less than or equal to 15. So again, yes it is possible, but it’s done in a different way with different limitations

@@SpinningSquareWaves wow thank you for a clear explanation. I kind of guess that there were some magic going on here! Great song and great usage of the tech! Reason for me to land here was that I'm fiddling with converting a full collection of Adlib-music to C64/FM. A new world just opened up to the different FM-chips and their quirks!

I did! 😄 Although, to get the full effect, I also combined ssg-eg with a trick that creates C64-like noise along with 0 hz frequencies

Nope, I did it mostly by hand. The ssg-eg tuning I had done beforehand (this is for the note being sung), but specific frequencies I got for speech synthesis were initially pulled from a Wikipedia article on formant frequencies, which I then tweaked until it sounded right. I got the 'M' sound from a pdf I found talking about the formants of consonant sounds

Well, you could you one instrument, but you would need to use way too many effects for that to be practical. For this song, I made a unique instrument for each pitch, with some duplicates for variation in timbre, such as the vibrato instruments which use ADSR macros and a different tuning method Feel free to download the fur module in the description, if you want to see exactly how I did it :) The actual tuning part was pretty easy. If I haven't mentioned this before, I have a big table of different tunings sorted by timbre and pitch. So, if I want a sawtooth wave at A-4, then I just look at the table and choose the tuning I want. It saves a lot of time over doing everything from scratch each time. The most time-consuming part is usually just copying ADSR values over by hand