Amiga (Paula) vs Atari ST (Yamaha AY)

[pink^abyss]

As already briefly mentioned, another use case for Amigas Paula is wavetable modulation.
You can join together multiple small sample loops (for instance 128 bytes) and replay them without gaps.
When used along with sample mip-mapping you can get quite nice audio quality, compared to just pitched samples replaying. Here is a production that uses this tech:
[ Show youtube player ]

[Estrayk]

Originally Posted by pink^abyss

As already briefly mentioned, another use case for Amigas Paula is wavetable modulation.
You can join together multiple small sample loops (for instance 128 bytes) and replay them without gaps.
When used along with sample mip-mapping you can get quite nice audio quality, compared to just pitched samples replaying. Here is a production that uses this tech:

[OFFTOPIC], Btw Pink, When we will see Pretracker to the public?

[mc6809e]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

Well, the chip is actually producing the sound, not just playing it back.



You're really clutching at straws to bring up a feature that has never even been used.



Not the same. Not as many available channels and lower samplerate.



Yes, but any wavetable sample would not be considered small in the context of a chip tune.

This misunderstanding has been going on for ages.

The problem is with the loose definition of "sample". Paula may be OR MAY NOT BE outputting a sample when it generates sounds.

What Paula does is take values read from memory and outputs them at variable rates and variable volumes. For a square wave, that may just two consecutive values stored in memory. Put -128 and 127 in memory and have Paula output them at some programmable rate and volume and you have a square wave.

The key is noticing that THOSE AREN'T SAMPLES. They're just two bytes in memory that describe a waveform. If you wanted a square wave with a different duty cycle, say 33%, store 6 bytes of something like -128,-128,-128,-128,127,127.

The memory used can contain anything, though -- square waves, triangle waves, sawtooth waves, random noise -- anything, including, but NOT EXCLUSIVELY, waveforms created by digitizing real world sounds and storing those.

Even digitized sounds can be output at various rates for different desired pitches. Paula doesn't just stupidly replay digitized sounds. It outputs waveforms at variable rates. It isn't just a dumb DAC.

And as was mentioned earlier, Paula can even take waveforms and use them to pitch and volume modulate other waveforms. The key difference between something like a simple synth chip and Paula is that Paula has access to programmable waveforms of any length while a simple synth chip uses fixed waveforms of fixed lengths (except for random noise).

[turrican3]

The Paula chipset is better than the st !!!
The st fans shouldn't come here and say crazy things.
Sometimes they can even argue you that the paula sounchip is crap !!!!
Are you kidding me ??? Paula is just near a perfection for soundchip from 1985. Atari st fans... You should respect that you are in an amiga forum and stop talking bullshit and even sometimes become agrssive because a guy tell you what i think is the truth : That in a nutshell the amiga soundchip is better. In some circonctence the atari st soundchip can sound better but it's without a doubt in a minority cases.
Believe me, i had an atari st and i loved this computer but when i saw and eard an amiga, the story changed.


I thought this war was finished long ago... I can't believe some still argue for the st.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by turrican3

I thought this war was finished long ago... I can't believe some still argue for the st.

You can blame Donnie for this thread existing. He made a blatantly false statement about the ST chip having "aged better" than Paula because it didn't play "clunky samples", I jumped down his throat at his clearly erroneous statement, and it all escalated from there.

[Hewitson]

dmacon: Agree with most points made, but you seem to keep thinking I am talking about the YM2149 specifically. I am talking about the YM range in general, not just the one used in the ST (which isn't even a Yamaha design, anyway).

roondar: Thanks for sharing the link, I haven't heard the modulation before.

mc6809e: Wow, you mean you can generate a square wave with a DAC? Who'd have thought!

[dmacon]

Hi Pink,

Originally Posted by pink^abyss

As already briefly mentioned, another use case for Amigas Paula is wavetable modulation.
You can join together multiple small sample loops (for instance 128 bytes) and replay them without gaps.
When used along with sample mip-mapping you can get quite nice audio quality, compared to just pitched samples replaying. Here is a production that uses this tech:
[ Show youtube player ]

very cool, thanks for the video. This is a perfect example of "chip music".

Historically, this kind of wavetable synthesis was pioneered by the German company PPG, and implemented in their "PPG Wave" line of synthesizers from the end-70s to the mid-80s.

For instance, the PPG Wave 2 uses small 128 byte wavetables with 8-bit resolution, which contain tifferent types of harmonic overtones.

The smooth change in harmonic content is being achieved by linear interpolation between multiple wavetables.

[ Show youtube player ]
[ Show youtube player ]

Your example is aiming at C-64 like filtered sounds, but I think it would not be that hard to implement this sound engine on the Amiga.

[dmacon]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

dmacon: Agree with most points made, but you seem to keep thinking I am talking about the YM2149 specifically. I am talking about the YM range in general, not just the one used in the ST (which isn't even a Yamaha design, anyway).

Okay, but this is why I was specifically restraining my argument to keep somewhat in-line with the thread topic.

You probably know that even among Yamaha's FM line, there are huge differences in features, because they targeted many different market segments.

But here I am now bringing wavetable synthesis into the mix. Maybe the thread title should be changed into something more exciting than the crappy Atari ST sound...

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by dmacon

Okay, but this is why I was specifically restraining my argument to keep somewhat in-line with the thread topic.

You probably know that even among Yamaha's FM line, there are huge differences in features, because they targeted many different market segments.

Absolutely. I touched on that earlier in the thread.

Originally Posted by dmacon

But here I am now bringing wavetable synthesis into the mix. Maybe the thread title should be changed into something more exciting than the crappy Atari ST sound...

Well I'd agree with that. I didn't see much point discussing the ST sound, even though in rare cases games do sound better on the ST.

[coder76]

While there were not many chiptunes made for Amiga, the quality of these can certainly be better than on Atari ST or c64. C64 sids actually sound boring in comparison to these.

[ Show youtube player ]

[Frog]

Well,

I first got an Atari 250 STF and then an Amiga 500 and i was amazed by the quality of the sound on Amiga.
The music that i heard later on Amiga games, demos and also Amiga cracktro were quite different from the ST music, sometimes i find the Amiga too clear (i would like to enable the filter), with a lack of the famous ST bassdrum.

I think that people makes music with the hardware they own, their knowledge and their ideas to create and compose some music, there's so many music editor on Amiga with so many different quality of sound.
Some people used Soundtracker when some others people create their own music editor to get the sound they want to hear.
I think it's a bit the same thing on C64 and Atari ST, they tried to do thing with the audio processor and even the CPU processor that was perhaps not the idea of the hardware conceptor and yes it's crazy

For example the Musicline editor seems really powerful but was not so used, i discover later the possibility of OctaMED, i like Soudmon music, Future Composer, TFMX and lot of music of the games, demos, cracktro... i put on my Amiga.
I formely know that if i listen to David Whittaker music i will not have the same musical experience that if i listen to Chris Huelbeck for example.

i'll be a bit hard but compare Turrican on :
Amiga
[ Show youtube player ]

Atari ST
[ Show youtube player ]

But i'm agree sometimes i also like the atari ST music of a game. Xenon is a good example, i tend to prefer the ATARI ST version and i understand the effort to make something "hey we've samples do you heard the difference" on the Amiga version

Perhaps that if you enable the amiga filter, you would have a musical experience closer to that of the atari
If you want to heard something on Amiga that is closer to the Atari ST music then don't hesitate to listen to Jochen Hippel (aka Mad Max on Atari ST) work, better listen to Hippel, Hippel 7V, Hippel COSO.
Later i was really impressed by DIGIBooster ((i know that Oktalyzer do 8 voices in 1989 but the quality was not the same) and then Digibooster PRO on Amiga that was a kind of Fastracker II on Amiga (the famous PC editor) because i was looking for this kind of experience, something better than the classic Amiga 4 channels and about the same years i was quite happy to to see a kind of revival of the "soundchip" music with the AHX editor.

some AHX music
[ Show youtube player ]

Pink already post the video of his "new" Pretracker

Some Jochen Hippel Music
[ Show youtube player ]

and if you've not enough music to listen on Amiga then you can try :
HVSC
SNDH
i don't know very well the Nintendo or Sega sound but i guess there's many good musics too but i'm offtopic.

oh and i'm still happy to listen to Atari ST music from time to time

a coder/musician can certainly give a better experience of the possibility of each computer but i think that you can really do many thing on Amiga.
BTW thank you for the video of the "Amiga History Launch of Amiga", it's just amazing

And their is another interesting old discussion on the atariage forum Atari ST music vs Amiga music

[Ian]

Originally Posted by Foebane

HAHAHAHAHA! You ARE joking! Samples are better than beeps, every time.

Im sure someone has said this already, but my old friend SID says "Hi"

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Ian

Im sure someone has said this already, but my old friend SID says "Hi"

There are quite good SID-Players available for the Amiga ... so Paula can reproduce (almost) everything SID does.

[donnie]

Originally Posted by Foebane

You can blame Donnie for this thread existing. He made a blatantly false statement about the ST chip having "aged better" than Paula because it didn't play "clunky samples", I jumped down his throat at his clearly erroneous statement, and it all escalated from there.

There is nothing erroneous about my statement. Its a fucking opinion.


And i did not say paula was inferior to yamaha ay. I said it had aged better in SOME ways. Namely that there is less room for incompetent samples for sound fx.

[Ian]

Originally Posted by Gorf

There are quite good SID-Players available for the Amiga ... so Paula can reproduce (almost) everything SID does.

Well, you said it yourself, almost, so it cannot.

It's probably down to personal preferance, but I do prefer a good chip tune to a sampled one (Maybe not on ST, as the chip is mostly produces bleeps and deeks that sound like tinny garbage). Chiptunes are back in fashion, you can get loads of music on spotify/amazon music. Not so much for limited 4 channel sampled tracks though.

Anyway....

[ Show youtube player ]

Your welcome.

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[Gorf]

But it does come very close - and it is certainly much better than the other way around.

And the same goes for the Atari soundchip: Paula can with some effort be tweaked to play the same sounds but an Atari will never play Amiga mods.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by Gorf

Paula can with some effort be tweaked to play the same sounds but an Atari will never play Amiga mods.

Not as good, at least...

[saimon69]

I wonder if microsampling can be considered close to wavetables or to mod music; considered samples are very tiny (max a couple hundred bytes)

[Ian]

Originally Posted by Gorf

But it does come very close - and it is certainly much better than the other way around.

And the same goes for the Atari soundchip: Paula can with some effort be tweaked to play the same sounds but an Atari will never play Amiga mods.

Paula cannot do any of it, from my understanding anyway, the CPU can emulate it, and play it through Paula, but Paula can only do PCM and has absolutely no synth ability whatsoever.

[Foebane]

What's so good about synths?

I remember back in the 1980s music fans up and down the country harping on and on and on about Ultravox and their synth "hit" Vienna, and I for one couldn't see what all the fuss was about. All I saw was an average song with a pretentious video.

As for SID, I think it's really rather overrated.

I guess I just don't like that sort of synthetic sound.