Outrun AGA

[TuRRIcaNEd]

Originally Posted by malko

I am wondering if TuRRIcaNEd can change his track to include a steel drum ?

As I said above - my conversion of Magical Sound Shower has *always* had a steel drum sample as the lead instrument.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by TuRRIcaNEd

As I said above - my conversion of Magical Sound Shower has *always* had a steel drum sample as the lead instrument.

Yours and the Outrunners remix if i remember clearly

[Adrian Browne]

I'm very nearly done with converting tons of graphics to AGA- it was a bit of a headache at times but nearly there now- everything still looks great, with only limited concessions here and there---mostly colour swaps etc. Next up for converting, will be all the in-game traffic and perhaps other miscellaneous graphics too.

[x-vision]

Originally Posted by malko

+1 .
Have always associated this music with that instrument.
As I am curious, I am wondering if TuRRIcaNEd can change his track to include a steel drum ?

+2

It IS clearly intended to be a steel drum (even being synthed). It sounds like a a steel drum and any conversion should sound like a steel drum.

[TuRRIcaNEd]

Originally Posted by saimon69

I remember your tune rendition and were very good, it also helped me to create my reverb effect for the high scores (not sure i sent you that)

You did not - please do!

As far as what makes the filesizes quite large, it's less the number of discrete instruments such as the number of chord inversions and mixed drum samples required for each tune - this is where having a hard limit of four channels really trips things up. I'm sure I can get the filesizes down by resampling/downsampling - effectively sacrificing some audio fidelity for file size. Hopefully doing that with the mixed drum samples alone (where fidelity is less of a big deal) can give a decent improvement.

Generally speaking DJ MeTune's effort does sound really good, and closer to the arcade's sounds than mine. It also keeps two channels free, thus making implementation of sound FX easier.

His methodology is really clever and involves taking long, HQ samples of the arcade music as a whole and using the tracker 9xx [sample offset] command to set the start point for each individual note, however the downside of this is that it is very memory-hungry. The demo version he posted is already over 300k and it only goes as far as halfway through the first chorus.

You'd be looking at at least another couple of long, HQ samples in order to do the rest of it that way (The steel drum wigout middle-eight I suspect would be particularly tricky in this regard) - so let's say another 600k at a conservative estimate. That's 900k total - almost half your Chip RAM gone for one song, and that's on an AGA machine.

[IM76]

i used the same approach to make my splash wave mod, and in fact the final size is 830kb. moreover i used all 4 channels since i didn't compose it with the intention of using it in some game but as a personal challenge. great job by djmetune to make his song practically identical using only 2 channels. unfortunately if you want to make it as equal as possible to the arcade without losing anything the size compared to a conventional mod increases a lot

[TuRRIcaNEd]

Originally Posted by IM76

i used the same approach to make my splash wave mod

Do you have a link handy for listening?

I must confess, of the conversions I did, Splash Wave is the one furthest from completion (as it was my least favourite tune of the main three)

Interestingly, it's also the only one of the main three that worked using the "default" vblank tracker song speed of F06 - the other two had to be double-tempo (F03).

[TCD]

Originally Posted by TuRRIcaNEd

Do you have a link handy for listening?

Here it is: https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php...74#post1612574

[x-vision]

Originally Posted by IM76

i used the same approach to make my splash wave mod, and in fact the final size is 830kb. moreover i used all 4 channels since i didn't compose it with the intention of using it in some game but as a personal challenge. great job by djmetune to make his song practically identical using only 2 channels. unfortunately if you want to make it as equal as possible to the arcade without losing anything the size compared to a conventional mod increases a lot

Great work, I love your conversion.

Do you think it would be possible to somehow optimize the size, to make it usable in any of the ports?

[IM76]

the problem is that outrun uses 8 channels for the main melody+bass+chords (which i condensed into the first three channels), and i'd honestly avoid touching them so as not to distort the song. the only way forward is to rewrite the fourth percussion channel accepting the fact that in the arcade (and in my mod) 16 pcm channels play on channel 4, with a minimum of 4-5 together at any one time. In order to make it as faithful as possible, I cut and recomposed long rhythmic samples for use with the offset control. Of course, deleting them recoups about 456kb of ram and the mod becomes 374kb (not calculating the size of the new samples to be added) but the song still remains at least 4-channel and you have to accept the fact that by composing the track in a conventional way the rhythmic part will be greatly penalized

[saimon69]

This is one of the case in which "accurate" is barely possible, so a strong cover or readaptation need to be considered

[TuRRIcaNEd]

Originally Posted by IM76

the problem is that outrun uses 8 channels for the main melody+bass+chords

Yup, plus splitting the PCM sample channels (software-mixed, I think) for the drums (panned Left/Centre/Right), along with a further set of PCM channels set up the same way for the sound FX.

Magical Sound Shower actually doubles up the melody line on a couple of the YM2151 FM channels - with the lead line a combination of two FM patches - so the background chords are usually missing a resolving note... This made reverse-engineering the chord inversions a real pain at times!

[saimon69]

Hey TurricanEd, did you try to use hoot? Has the advantage to turn on and off single channels and to record them, however with Power Drift (that i suspect having the same audio chip) the drum channels were not selectable; this is not the latest version that i made (i did refine the loops later on) but gives an idea, and is reduced at three channels
[ Show youtube player ]

[TuRRIcaNEd]

Originally Posted by saimon69

...this is not the latest version that i made (i did refine the loops later on) but gives an idea, and is reduced at three channels

Nice work!

Admittedly, this was a long time ago, but I used a customised build of MAME which enabled export of the YM2151 patches to disk in a format that could be imported into the VOPM VST instrument plugin. I then sampled/exported the patches playing all the required notes and chords as WAV and converted them to 8SVX format using MilkyTracker.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by TuRRIcaNEd

Nice work!

Admittedly, this was a long time ago, but I used a customised build of MAME which enabled export of the YM2151 patches to disk in a format that could be imported into the VOPM VST instrument plugin. I then sampled/exported the patches playing all the required notes and chords as WAV and converted them to 8SVX format using MilkyTracker.

My approach was been less sophisticated but have the single channels exit in wav allowed me to obtain decent samples

[pink^abyss]

Originally Posted by IM76

I've just finished composing my version of Splash Wave, I'm putting the link here as it seems the right place. It's totally unusable in a game, given the huge size of the mod (830kb) but I composed it both because it's one of my favourite arcade songs of all time, and for the challenge of converting a 20 channel song to the 4 channels of the amiga.https://soundcloud.com/user-87494413...un-splash-wave

Nice! Sounds like a lot of work. How many chord samples did you need?

[IM76]

36 chords, and I made them fit into 17 samples with multiple chords to be called up with the 9xx command (with some I kept 1 chord per sample because they required a loop). I rewrote the mod 3 times in all, one of which because I had initially underestimated the number of samples needed for this song

[malko]

Originally Posted by logo

[...]Thought police ? [...]

Some people call it self-censorship, and it seems to be fashionable in our Western societies actually.

Originally Posted by IM76

I've just finished composing my version of Splash Wave, I'm putting the link here as it seems the right place. It's totally unusable in a game, given the huge size of the mod (830kb) but I composed it both because it's one of my favourite arcade songs of all time, and for the challenge of converting a 20 channel song to the 4 channels of the amiga.

https://soundcloud.com/user-87494413...un-splash-wave

[no9]

Originally Posted by IM76

36 chords, and I made them fit into 17 samples with multiple chords to be called up with the 9xx command (with some I kept 1 chord per sample because they required a loop).

You can have loops without using actual loops in Protracker. Use 9xx [TM ;>) https://streamable.com/pjsilc

[x-vision]

Originally Posted by IM76

the problem is that outrun uses 8 channels for the main melody+bass+chords (which i condensed into the first three channels), and i'd honestly avoid touching them so as not to distort the song. the only way forward is to rewrite the fourth percussion channel accepting the fact that in the arcade (and in my mod) 16 pcm channels play on channel 4, with a minimum of 4-5 together at any one time. In order to make it as faithful as possible, I cut and recomposed long rhythmic samples for use with the offset control. Of course, deleting them recoups about 456kb of ram and the mod becomes 374kb (not calculating the size of the new samples to be added) but the song still remains at least 4-channel and you have to accept the fact that by composing the track in a conventional way the rhythmic part will be greatly penalized

The 8 channel issue was preciselly what I was thinking about, so, why don't give Paula those 8 channels?

[ Show youtube player ]

source: https://powerprograms.nl/amiga/audio-mixing.html

It takes very few processing time, so it is totally usable and much easier to achieve a smaller size since you can use much smaller samples.

Because the other alternatives would be to reduce sampling quality and perform some kind of dithering on the samples and/or player (like in GRID) or reduce the required samples, replacing some parts that require their own samples with the ones that better suit for most cases, even the cover sound less loyal to the original