Atari 8-bit gets Rick-Rolled

It's a shame for vintage computer owners to miss out on the latest 'net fads, so here's a quick&dirty pic and audio rip I did on the Atari. 2 bit audio, picture is a simple 4-level conversion of one found from Google Image Search.

Category:

Comedy

Tags:

• atari
• rick-rolled
• rick
• astley
• demo

[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.

[DjKlzonez]

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

[setsers1]

WTFOMGLMFAOLOLROFLALLADAMNIT

[NotATube]

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

[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.

[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.

[czlowiekwatomizerze]

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

[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?

[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! (^_^)

[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!

[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.