iteration 25! more fixes,. the saving and loading works properly now. plus added some stuff,. read the new help screen! also, pressing B cycles through 3 background images or none.

link
http://www.iterationgames.com/BEEPbox_i025.zip

in the zip file;
-the 2 dll files needed for the synthesis and GM control [ 132k]
-an exe file i built in GM to compose the Tracks with,. the BEEPbox.
-a gm6 file that showes how the playback is done in GM.
-5 sample songs i made for testing,..
-three readme files.

so far i got it working, Im still adding features to the BEEPbox and the playback code as well, so go ahead and play around with it you could use it as is however the file format may change and the slide amounts will likely be re-maped as the values currently don't allow for as much range as is possible.

whatsit: a 16 step sequencer with 8 patterns [ currently ] that playes an emulation of the classic Atari POKEY sould chip. build a beat in the editor and play it back form code!

oh here is a link to the gmpokey topic;
http://forums.gamemaker.nl/index.php?showt...214574&hl=pokey

This post has been edited by jph_iterationGAMES: Aug 23 2006, 10:27 PM

I think that you are fimiliar with Fl studios. Are you?
I like the idea and how you made the visual style. Looks cool,. 7/10

dj motion - yup I have used FruityLoops,. although in building this I was just thinking more about the old roland machines from the early 80s,. like the 606 or 808. [ http://www.synthmuseum.com/roland/roltr80801.html ] I suppose that would be where FL got it's design. I actually stopped using FL in favor of the non-corporate freeware music studio software BUZZ [ http://www.buzzmachines.com/ ] I can not recomend buzz enouph for serious sound designers and musicians.
So where you able to compose a tune in this here BEEPbox ? I'd lov to hear anything you ppl make using this simple tracker.

This post has been edited by jph_iterationGAMES: Aug 7 2006, 12:29 PM

Funny little project. I've thought about creating a little sequencer myself but looking at RMT this seemed like a lot of effort for something that would only interest a few (looking at the lack of response so far I guess that square wave beatboxes are not in fashion today ).

The interface is smooth - I like the way how panning is represented by slanting the beat boxes. It wasn't clear from the interface how slides are set, although I quickly found out.

Some issues and wishes:

• If you Load and then press Cancel on the dialog box, the program hangs (I expect the same for saving)
• Get rid of F1.
• The program really needs a way to mute channels or to stop/start playback
• When a new song loads, at least make playback start at the beginning of the (1st) pattern
• Tempo should be saved / loaded with the song
• It would be nice to be able to set frequencies to notes (according to the distortion) instead of having to look up the notes themselves
• Stereo isn't spelled 'sterio'
• There is no example GM6 for using songs: instead there is a GB1 backup file which doesn't work correctly

Last but not least the issues that cost me a little song I was working on...

First of all, I found out that my country locale was set to comma for digits as opposed to the dot (meaning that 1.5 will be stored as 1,5). For some reason this locale isn't considered when loading the files, which results in nothing but errors reading reals.

Also, even with the dot back in place as the locale, it was disappointing to find out that a pattern I had just saved did not show up when I loaded it again. After some experimentation I found out that the second pattern needs to contain data as well, otherwise the first won't even be loaded.

Edit: I forgot to mention that I think it may be better to store the values in a binary file. This means only 28 bytes per beat are stored (4*freq+dist+vol+pan+3 slides), 448 per pattern and 3584 for the entire song (maybe one byte more for the tempo). There are no decimal numbers so there is no reason to store the values as reals, and all values fit in the 0-255 range (for slide negative values just subtract them from 255).

Looking forward to see a next version though. I hope this will pick up some interest from our fellow Game Makers.

This post has been edited by Smarty: Aug 7 2006, 12:50 PM

This needs a serious interface revamp.

wow, thanks smarty you are so thorough! I'll fix these and re-upload,. not too sure what to do about the dot-coma thing, and wisdom for me there? Should probably save to binary format for file size anyway, however i couldn't figure a way to work that, . oh some keys aren't told in the release, I guess, as SPACE does start and stop playback.
for thoses tuned notes I'll add a piano bar along the bottom so if you click a note it will set the current step to that note. sound good?
humm,. not sure about that second pattern needs info ting,. i'll test it here.

thanks for taking you time to play around with it and more importantly to post a propper comment! i.e. helpfull!

E-magination - how is that helpfull? i have no idea what you think is poorly done or could b better,.

This post has been edited by jph_iterationGAMES: Aug 7 2006, 12:49 PM

The piano bar sounds like a nice idea, but you'll need quite some piano keys to cover all the chords. And bass notes and clear square waves have different frequencies, so you probably need to look at the distortion level and then switch between them accordingly.

I just edited my message to insert a comment about binary files. If you need more help with this, let us know.

Well, the interface would be alot easier if it was a tracker.
You know, like back in the old days...

I thought the interface was very nicely done... Even though it takes some getting used to, it was very cohesive and artful. I found it fun to just experiment with things to see how it worked, and the interface only added to this. Nice work!

E-magination - ha. yeah, i thought that once i got a ways into building this,. but i really didn't know what this would be when i started. You could build a proper tracker for the gmpokey? till then i'll just hack away at my 808 style step sequencer,. .

FredFredrickson - thanks mate. that's why it is like it is couse i likes it like that,. or havent taken the time to do it better yet! you'll find most things as simple as they can b.,

Mute works nicely - very clear interpretation. I agree with FredFrederickson - the interface invites experimentation. So apart from the suggestions made before, our list goes on:

• When hitting Esc, I'd like to see a warning that the file I've been working on hasn't been saved yet. A little standard Windows courtesy, so to speak.
• Warn if a file is about to be overwritten and ask whether they want to continue (Windows courtesy pt. II).
• The example file has a typo: the file it tries to open is beepbox_001.pbb but the example file is actually called beepbox_003.pbb.
• Imsorrytobethespellingpolice: The bottom right reads interationgames, not sure whether that's on purpose. The help reads 'seleted'.

And I have to admit that the saving is getting me a little bit frustrated - I have hardly been able to save a single file. Well, yes, it saves, but I found out it saves data as if all tracks are empty. That's why my saved files load nothing. Check out this save of a randomly generated pattern (there isn't much to see). When I fill all the patterns with something random, it does save. But I don't know where the breakpoint is.

Keep it up, though.

Wow this thing is awesome.
It's a pain to create a basic melody though, i'm looking forward for the piano function.
My middle mouse button doesn't work propperly. maybe you could assign the copying to ctrl+c and ctrl+v like in any other program?
And maybe you could make multiple notes selectable?

You should do it like the trackers do: the note keeps playing until it gets cut rather than stopping to play on the next step.

Oh yeah add an Arpreggiator, that would be cool.

keep it up. Will definitely check future versions.

Well I tried, I could make a very basic trance beat with a weird snare, weird kick and weird hi hat, but that was it. I,m gona try some more with it.BTW, I still really like the idea!!!

This post has been edited by DJ Motion: Aug 9 2006, 04:32 PM

[quote=DJ Motion,Aug 9 2006, 04:25 PM]
[quote=jph_iterationGAMES,Aug 7 2006, 12:09 PM]So where you able to compose a tune in this here BEEPbox ?

I find this tool absolutely amazing, as a musician I've been looking for something like this. Is there a way to export the tracks as audio files (wav, aif,...) so I can use them differently?

bolino- thanks,. i suppose you could use one of those audio-steam loop-back programes to capture the output of your sound card,. however i would suggest you run your audio out into a crusty marshal gitar amp and place a mic in a good corner of the room and record to an old analoge tape machine, then dump that back to your computer and edit from there,. but thats just me perhaps i like to much noise and compression.

"DJ Motion- cool keep at it, i have been able to get some quite sick noises out if it,. and i find it fun.

9_6- thanks,. i like it too. I've added a simple 'keyboard' along the bottom as i had threatend to do. so writing tunes is getting simpler. yeah i will add an alternate for the MMB,. Shift LMB i suppose.., "You should do it like the trackers do: the note keeps playing until it gets cut rather than stopping to play on the next step." humm,. thats simple you just copy the note to the next step,. . i hadn't planed to add proper envilopes, so this just made more sence to me,. programing a tracker for a realtime synth you begin to realise the posibilites or rather limitless.

that leads me to the point that once this is how i like it and i have time to clean up the positively embaracing code i will likely just release the .gm6 so ppl can hack it into new things. anyway i'll post an update in a few min,. look to the top.

Actually, I may be able to help out with the WAV export. I could add a savefile function to GMPokey that exports the file output as a standard uncompressed PCM wave file. That way people can also start building their own custom 8-bit sound effects.

Now I just need to figure out again what the WAV file format looked like...

this is very neat...but how come you could only play such a small chunk and not make, say, a whole song?

smarty- now that would be way cool! wave output could have some neet uses,. however the main reason i like the gmpokey is that it is a real-time synth,. and a dirty funky one at that,. and this realtimeness allows the game to have interactive control over the muisc.

necro - yeah as its a wip it ain't done yet. you can of course playback the patterns in any order you like using some gml code and the playback example thats their,. I have it playing patterns randomly in a game im working on and that works quite well.

hope fully i'll get some free time to work on this again soon,. and do a proper first release.

well, how can it ba new release , anyways...would wave files from this be large or small, because everthing I try to do in wav format ends up taking a ton of memory much to my dismay.

I fully agree with you, but I can imagine people just want to create sound effects with it without having to add the DLLs. Well, I'm going to make both happy.

I've figured out the wave format and I'm near completing the export. Here is a test from your example GM6 in which I imported two new functions to start and stop recording. Cues were set before playback and to stop after finishing the last pattern.

Check out the WAV file


The wave exports I have build use standard uncompressed PCM, which can grow big depending on the length of the sound and the quality of it. If you want it to become smaller, you have a few options:

• Use tools like CoolEdit to compress it or even make an MP3 out of it (I am not implementing compression, there are plenty such tools around). Edit: The Windows Sound Recorder itself already allows you to change what codec to use, so load it up there and experiment with the settings available.
• Change stereo output to mono if stereo isn't necessary (stereo doubles the file size)
• Reduce the playback frequency (44100 is CD quality, try 22050 for reasonable results - GM seems to play at this rate anyway).

All will be documented.

This post has been edited by Smarty: Sep 7 2006, 01:41 PM