SquareWave has a 2A03 song that showcases a cool effect that can be achieved by playing two square waves with the same notes at the same time, with the first's waveform set to 25% duty, and the second's set to -25% duty. This effect is called the "pseudofilter" (at least, that's what the comments call it) because of how its tinny, needly waveform resembles the sound of a 50% square wave run through a high pass filter. The basic steps...
Pac-Man Championship Edition Famicom Version's Normal Mode music and Blaster Master's Area 4 and Game Over themes all use this interesting effect in the Famicom/NES's 2A03's triangle channel.
In Blaster Master, it sounds like a ribbit; calling to mind the main goal of this game: to rescue the protagonist's pet frog Fred.
In Pac-Man Championship Edition Famicom Version, it sounds like the overdriven synthesizers that one typically hears in acid music.
These are both created using the same feature: the triangle's linear counter. By setting the linear counter to a low value between 1 and 3, it causes the triangle to pulse (mute and unmute itself) very quickly instead of sustaining a single note. Though it is not possible at the moment to create this effect in FamiStudio, it is possible in Furnace Tracker using effect 19xx. Here is a sample Furnace project file that shows this triangle effect.
Once again, I have discovered an old (2012) romhack of Drayano's that requires a bad dump in order to patch it.
Once again, I will provide instructions on how to patch Sacred Gold and Storm Silver using a legitimate good dump of the game.
16 October 2023 edit: And once again, I am wrong! I wrote this post quickly and misremembered some things. I've actually only encountered one other hack of Drayano's that uses a bad dump as a base rom (which...
In August, I was listening to Tim Follin's work. When I listened to Chronos on youtube, the suggested videos were for other ZX Spectrum beeper music, such as Rubber Love by Mister Beep. I was blown away! I had thought that Tim Follin getting 5 tinny voices out of the one channel beeper was the peak of what one could do, but Rubber Love had a full sound to it! I listened to a lot of ZX Spectrum beeper...
The closest thing "Countdown" has to a melody is this odd harsh beeping instrument. It really drives the song's tense nature. Unfortunately, the arranged version of Countdown from the 2023 remaster completely removes this lead instrument.
To my surprise, all the music files in the remaster are completely unencrypted, uncompressed WAVE files (The devs should've compressed them, they could have reduced the file size of the music from ~675 MB to ~63 MB). This made it very easy to modify the...