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Been digging a bit deeper on this, and dismantled my A5000 a bit more. The HDD in my A5000 is a Connor CP30126 (120Mb). In typical luck, its the one drive that the internet doesn't seem to have any specs on for where the master/slave jumpers are at. I found an Acorn tech doc that mentions this drive...

I'm in the process of archiving my 5.25 floppy disks. Does anyone know of a good program that does sector by sector copies and shows which, if any, sectors cannot be read?
Cheers!

Time to watch micro men again I think..

I've been following the Pi-co-pro thread with some interest, but since I'm more of a software kinda guy I have been wondering about what sort of applications such a beastie could be used for... So what ideas are folks thinking about cooking up with this? My understanding is that the tube interface i...

Hi all, I've been rummaging in my old 5.25" disk archives and uncovered a few previously unreleased TYB sampled sound & graphics demos from back in the day which I thought I'd share. For now we've published them to the bitshifters site, so here you go: Expansions sampled sound demo: https:/...

Bit of a slow followup, but I finally had chance to do a bit more on this. I disconnected the original IDE drive and wired up the CF adapter with 512mb Sandisk CF card as master. A kind person provided me with an ADFS version of !HForm so I formatted the drive as per this thread . It worked great. I...

Great work guys. The ability to play direct in jsbeeb is awesome.

Hi there,
Welcome - Always good to have more 8-bit coders in the room!
Another vote here for BeebAsm. It's like a comforting old friend.

Cheers
Simon

It's %f not f%.

If doing this in a batch file rather than command line, it's:

I was thinking maybe using a source control system. I don't think theres a need to keep anything private - I'd quite like to release the bits of the website so anyone can recreate it easily. We have had a few websites disappear, so I would like to give this one the best chance to come back from the...

So I had my 3 way IDE ribbon cable and IDE CF card interface delivered. I set the CF card as slave, and plugged it all in. Blue IDE connector->main board, next IDE connector->CF card, last IDE connector->original IDE HDD. CF card is powered off the spare 4-pin floppy power cable. It lights up ok. Re...

fwiw I'm running Win 10/BeebEm and it works ok for me.

Just had a peek at this, and on closer inspection it does appear that the ice.vgm is unusual in that it has a lot of unnecessary duplicate commands; repeated setting of the same volume on the same channel, same tones, etc. I noticed it was authored in deflemask so it might be that doesn't generate o...

Wow! That's great. I'll have to check out this vgmtool marvel in the am. I noticed that some of the frequencies were being repeated set even though the volume on that channel was zero - I guess that's what VGMTool can strip out If it was on channel 2, that will be by design for a tuned noise effect....

It comes out at 19846 bytes Exo compressed in our raw format, but 12847 bytes after Julian's envelope compression.

Impressive! That's a good chunk of extra reduction. I could perhaps try reverse engineering Julian's technique and incorporate it into my script. One script to rule them all!

That sounds freakin awesome mate! Good job. How were you comparing the difference between 50Hz & 100Hz resampling? Using a PC vgm player I hope? Yes. My concern with quantizing is that it's inherently lossy. A tune authored at 60Hz, that is resampled to 50Hz, will send less information to the so...

Oh the other thing is that on reflection I am going to recall my complaint about 50Hz not being enough. I suspect the choppiness I heard previously was down to a couple of bugs I've now fixed. Most tunes seem to sound just fine at 50Hz. Happy days!

So I've buffed up my conversion script and shared it with Kieran to give it a beta test. Kieran - I've just checked in a new version of the script, there was indeed a flaw with the binary output, and wait commands werent being processed properly. It might not be perfect yet, but hopefully better now...

It's just a hunch, but I have a feeling that some of these would sound better at 60Hz or 100Hz... I'm a fussy listener and I'm sure I can detect a few flaws in the playback of the busier tunes when quantized to 50hz. Wasn't there a built-in 100Hz IRQ on the beeb? I seem to recall the BASIC sound eng...

Added bin file containing the raw data version of fluid vgm for your experimentation Kieran - hopefully formatted correctly! (not tested) - quantized to 50Hz

In fact it's just occurred to me that there's never going to be more than 11 bytes in a packet since that's the max you'll ever need to send to the sound chip to set the tone & volume of all 4 channels in one update.

Good plan. FWIW my quantizing approach is simply to simulate playing the VGM at full rate, but gather data commands into blocks until the desired playback interval (eg. 20ms) has elapsed, then flush the gathered data commands to the output steam and emit a WAIT50. I get the impression most VGM playe...

Ok tracked it down. Some tunes emit some awkward sequences when using tuned white/periodic noise - eg. they set ch2 freq, then later on set ch2 vol, and maybe later on switch to tuned periodic noise on ch 3. So there's various scenarios my script now to handle them. Attached retuned fluid.vgm for yo...

The complex bit of the retuning is that we cant just process the tone write data as it comes in byte by byte - we need both hi and lo parts of the tone register to be gathered before we can determine the original tone frequency and then retune it accordingly. So there's a fair bit of pre-fetching re...

*rubs hands* ohhh nice find! This'll come in very handy. This last little tuning bug is really getting on my nerves! I have a hunch though, it wont be long before I squash it... Simon - I've included the original fluid.vgm file - it could really do with some of your Beeb re-tuning magic please as so...

For sure! Extremely interesting, thanks Sarah.

Nice optimizations there. mmm I enjoy the idea of a co-pro as a glorified 3d accelerator. load it up with local space model data once, update the camera rot trans matrix each frame, then have it send back transformed/view culled vert lists. Bit of double buffering and split mode, and who knows what ...

Nice work Kieran! I looked over that vgmproc stuff, but it kinda blew my mind! Not any kind of toolchain I've seen before. You've done well, Jedi. I really like the idea of scanning for volume/tone patterns to create instruments and basically reverse engineer the sequenced patterns, but the more I l...

Ah good spot. One of these then: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Compact-Flash-to-IDE-ATA-Converter-Adapter-CF-to-40-pin-/230741799148?hash=item35b94870ec:g:-MEAAOxyl5lSIl-A (it has a jumper to select master/slave configuration) with one of these 3 way ide cables?: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/IDE-Ribbon-Cab...

Cheers Mark. I guess that rules that out as a not-so-cunning plan. I'm no hardware guru and still learning my way round all this, so ideally looking for simpler solutions that are within my capabilities. My next cunning plan is daisy chaining two ide drives (in a master/slave configuration) - origin...