Gameboy retro sounds

Aren't they just basic synth waves (square. saw etc)?

Andy is correct, these are basically classic synthesizer waveforms (square, saw, sine). However at those times gaming computers were limited to 8 bit and 11,025 or 22,05 KHz sound, and you can replicate this by means of the lo-fi family of the MFX algorithms. Also, sometimes they'd use a rather fast square LFO to modulate the pitch up and down one or two octaves to make a monophonic instrument sound like duophonic. Heck, a nice idea for a Tweakbook article!

BTW, if you have a Mac computer, have a look at the Space Oscillator plug-in, it's probably THE tool for such sounds:
http://www.sinevibes.com/software/space-oscillator/

They have 4 voices: 2 pulse/square, 1 triangle, 1 noise .

As Artemio said, the real 8-Bit musician pros improved the sound by using LFO so it sound a bit like C-64/SID.

cheers
Yuzo

Does anyone know what the note ranges were for the GameBoy?

I can feel some retro tunes coming on )

Artemio: any chance of Space Oscillator being ported to PC?

Andy, not that I don't want to, but I just can't use Windows!

I blame the designers /
of Windows!

By coincidence, I was toying around with this just yesterday.

Here's a tip: The "tone delay" parameters are your
friend when it comes to SID/8bit style sounds.

For example, in order to program a typical 8bit
snaredrum, set the first tone to a pulse wave, coarse tune
-12. program the TVA so it sounds at full volume for
about 2 "ticks". Set the tone delay to 2.

Now set the second tone to pink noise, the tva like tone 1
and set the filter to BPF, cutoff ~83. Tone delay should be 0.

The third tone should again be pink noise, the tva should
decay in around 10 ticks, filter same as tone 2. set the
tone delay to 4.

this way, there will be a short noise burst at the beginning,
then the pulse kicks in for a short time (to simulate the "body"), then the sounds switches back to noise and fades out.

A similar trick can be used for lead synths: make the first
one or two ticks of the sound use a different waveform, pitched once octave up, then switch to another wave.

Rapidly switching waveforms/pitches was a key element
to 8bit sounds

By the way, does anyone know whether it is possible to set the
step lfo to just loop 3 steps rapidly (8bit style arpeggios!) ?

Hi,

Why not use a 3 step Juno arp?

first of all, the juno arpeggiator triggers note-ons AFAIK.
for c64 style arpeggios you'd only want to change the pitch
without retriggering the note.

second, there is only one arpeggiator in the juno and therefore arpeggios cannot be saved per-patch nor is it possible to use
more than one arpeggio at a time.

looking at the sysex docs (and the synth itself, ofcourse) it seems that the step lfo is really always fixed to 16 steps, not more, not less. Am I missing something or is this really the case ?

edit: roland devs: please consider this:
- make the number of steps in the step-lfo configurable
(1..16)..
- make the step-lfo play-order
- one-shot
- repeat forward
- repeat "ping-pong" (back and forth)

It's called "Little Sound DJ". A music sequencer for Game Boy and Game Boy Color. I think there is a demoversion available:

[url]http://www.littlesounddj.com/lsd/


You can use it on Windows PC with several legal emulators like:

[url]http://vba.ngemu.com/

PLEASE KEEP THIS THREAD ALIVE ! I LOVE 8-Bit/16-Bit GAMEMUSIC.

Yuzo

bsp,

The Fantom X has a Step LFO that can be set to specific increases in pitch (if I remember rightly). I'm sure there's an article on it in Artemio's Tweakbook.

andy,

that's right - but how do I set the number of LFO steps
to 3 or 4 ? I did not find this in the manual.