Atari 8-bit gets Rick-Rolled

[setsers1]

WTFOMGLMFAOLOLROFLALLADAMNIT

[Membrane556]

I need to see if I can get the 99/4a to sing this song yes the speech synth for those machines can be made to sing.

[Bp1033]

Sounds like my home made lpt port DAC.

[AffidavidDonda]

rybagz you bastards you killed ashtley ^_^

[1jim3bob]

EXPLOSION!!!

[Agent1W]

Can you press escape lol?

[NotATube]

@stopmotionist; "when we have good digitized audio on the 800, this really does look bad."

You're right; I'd never describe the 800's sample playback as high-quality (4-bit audio never will be), but it *can* do significantly better than this.

@MiracleKD18; Main problem with samples on 8-bit machines is (a) it uses lots of memory and (b) playback is very CPU intensive- you have to "feed" each bit manually because the sound chips can't do it themselves. That's a problem for games and such.

[lutzdify]

@NotATube The audio for the 800 is 8-bit actually.

[NotATube]

@lutzdify; "audio for the 800 is 8-bit"

As far as sample resolution goes (*), you're mistaken- the Atari *is* 4-bit. Sample playback is achieved by altering the "raw" sound output register manually, and that only has 4 bits (giving 2^4 = 16 levels).

This is also why (AFAICT) there are 16 possible volume levels for ordinary square-wave sound output.

(*) Which is what people normally mean by (e.g.) 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit audio.

[NotATube]

(Additional) If it's possible to get better resolution, I'm not sure how, and the fact that I haven't heard significantly better sample quality from an Atari than my own 4-bit experiments suggests that it's not possible.

The square-wave frequency generator *is* capable of 256 different settings (8-bit) or 65536 (16-bit) in joint-channel mode, but that's not what most people would mean by 8-bit audio in most contexts.

[NotATube]

@NotATube; Then again, having read elsewhere in this thread, it looks like it *might* be possible to get at least 6, and possibly an ersatz 8 bits, and I'm wrong. :-)

Which would be very interesting if it really was possible! (^_^)

[czlowiekwatomizerze]

@NotATube Here's the code for 6-bit resolution on 3 channels. tiny (dot) pl (slash) h1xpn . The rest of the post is in Polish, but there's nothing worth translating.

[NotATube]

@czlowiekwatomizerze ; thanks, will take a look at that though I'm a bit rusty and was never a hardcore expert Atari hacker. :-)

[lolzvid]

READ the DESCRIPTION

[VideyoJunkei]

The Atari can do samples better than this, I suspect the length of the loop here may well fill the entire memory of the computer!

[Thorsupremecommander]

ofcourse it can. it has four summable channels with 4bit sample resolution per each channel alone (4 bit volume control as well). that gives 64 discrete values (16 v x 4 ch). dynamics nearly as good as old cassete players.

[ZeroIsMany]

@Thorsupremecommander More like dynamics as bad as old cassete players.

[czlowiekwatomizerze]

@Thorsupremecommander DACs in POKEY are not linear, and it's possible to find sets of values giving even 256 discrete levels, i.e. 8-bit resolution.

[NotATube]

@czlowiekwatomizerze; I'm intrigued- how does that work, surely there should still only be (at most) 64 discrete levels? Are there any good articles describing this on the web?

[czlowiekwatomizerze]

@NotATube The trick is that DACs are not linear, so e.g dac(3)+dac(5) is not necessarily the same as dac(2)+dac(6), and so on. Attach a voltmeter, write a script to walk through all values, and you'll see.

[wingnut4427]

for such an old machine that's pretty impressive.

[Acrinimiril]

Keep in mind, these 30 year old machines were not designed to play back voice or music at all.

What sounds bad to most is actually pretty good for such an old 8-bit machine, which would normally only be making beeps and boops.

[thorgallpl]

atari can do a lot better than this.

[dkthemovie]

thats also what i was thinking

[MiracleKD18]

LOL, Aren't 8-bit music supposed to sound synthetic and futuristic? LOL

[bandwagonretards]

pretty sure you can put this in a cartridge and play it on an atari. that's where the impressiveness comes in

[MiracleKD18]

Basicly, this video shows why 8-bit consoles/computers used Synthetic Music instead of Recorded :-D

[NotATube]

@MiracleKD18; "Basicly, this video shows why 8-bit consoles/computers used Synthetic Music instead of Recorded"

Well, this is because the sound chips were never designed with samples in mind- it's a hack. Also, because you have to keep feeding the data manually, it's very CPU intensive. Plus, the original versions of the 400 and 800 computers only had 8KB memory, which leaves very little for samples, which are memory-intensive, so they probably didn't care even if they knew it was possible!

[czlowiekwatomizerze]

@NotATube Nope, the 400 had 16kB, and the 800 had 48kB.

[wingnut4427]

yup. 37 years ago. lol

[spikeman14]

I like how everyone complains of the audio quality when the Atari system wasn't even invented to play high quality music but synthesized pieces. Great job!

[Stopmotionist]

Well, when we have good digitized audio (like the speech sample in Mirax Force and the music in Waveplay) on the 800, this really does look bad. Not to mention that the poster himself describes it as "quick&dirty". The picture could also have been much better.

[wholikesjello]

this makes my ears want to bleed it sounds so bad

[DjKlzonez]

that's the rick roll effect, it's normal

[Pazzknallie]

It's a good thing this vid is only 52 seconds, cause otherwise this would've hurt my ears eventually. good job.

[txe5502]

um thats not an Atari thats a Commodore64 I believe.

[txe5502]

Woops sorry I forgot that the Atari and C64 had a strong resemblance.  Yeah its an Atari.

[Acrinimiril]

As the video info says, "on the Atari."

[xOnyxTheHedgehogx]

Hmm... Sounds like you recorded from the back seats at the concert.