Re: CineSound Samples

At 04:55 PM 7/22/97 -0500, you wrote:
>> Why use pitch bend? Can't you just simulate the decay of the RC circuit and
>> spit out the appropriate frequency square wave? Am I confused? does it
>> produce something other than a square wave? This is similar to what you'll
>> need to do for the music circuits - generate a square wave of the correct
>> frequency.
>
> I think you might be a bit confused....
>
> Here's how it works in the original sound boards:
>
> The 3-bit "frequency select" (That's not what it's called, but that's what
it does) input goes through a DAC and some other stuff to set up an analog
control voltage for the VCO which generates the square wave output.
>
> It's the control voltage which moves gradually from one "operating point"
to another.
>
> I take it you want these samples to add to your emulator or something
along those lines, so it all depends upon how you want to implement your
sounds. If you want to describe the 566 VCO in software, simulating the
gradual change in control voltage will have some use to you, otherwise, I'm
not sure it will (For the record, I'm writing DSP code to mimic a 566 --
It's actually NOT that hardat all) You can't just switch one frequency
sample in and the other out if you want things to sound authentic, and Zonn
made the claim that pitch bend will easily take care of that problem.
>
> I'm not familiar with MIDI stuff, so I'll leave it up to others to answer
your questions about pitch bend. I just took Zonn's word for it that it
would work.

Hi Paul!

Welcome to "The V-List"!

To kind of clear things up, Joe is referring to an earlier discussion of
what would be the best way to build a universal Cinematronics sound board.

A zillion different ideas were tossed out, as you can imagine. The idea Joe
is referring to is one I brought up where you design a very simple
Cinematronics to Midi interface (using a PIC processor or the like). Then
by sampling the different sounds into the synthesizer you could play back
the sounds as needed by sending the proper MIDI notes. The pitch bend he's
referring to is a MIDI command that is sent as an attribute to a note. You
can adjust the pitch bend to be up to 8092 steps between notes giving all
the resolution one would need to slide between the different pitches needed
for Star Castle's background sounds.

The synthesizer wouldn't have to be a real synthesizer, one of the new sound
cards that allow sampling and playing of MIDI would work just fine.

I believe Al (Kossow) was keeping a history of this list, you might be able
to search it for the full discussion. (Go poking around www.spies.com)

On the sound card note...

I own most of the Cinematronics games, but I'd rather not go tearing apart
the games to ship the sound cards.

Star Castle should be an easy find, someone'll have a spare card (I'll bet
if you build a cable that goes from the PC's parallel port to the sound
card, you could write some very simple code to trigger each sound
individually for sampling).

I'm willing to sample the rarer sounds, but it'll be a little while before I
can get to them...(I have to lose one of these jobs! ...Mama don't let you
kids grow up to be a contract engineer... *twang* *twang*)

-Zonn
Received on Tue Jul 22 16:31:09 1997