bitshifters / beeb-tracker

Beeb Tracker music disk demo

beeb-tracker

Beeb Tracker music disk demo

A Bitshifers Production for the 8-bit 6502 BBC Micro

Contents

• Routines & Modules for playing back compressed RAW VGM files.
• Routines for BBC Micro compatible Exomiser decompression
• Two demo disks showcasing what the SN76849 is capable of

Demo Disk Volume 1

Contains 26 'Battle of the Bits' VGM music files.

Demo Disk Volume 2

Contains 17 Sega Master System 'Ninja Gaiden' VGM music files.

Notes

VGM is a format that captures sound chip music generated by older hardware. It is a stream of raw data that is written to the sound chips registers. The BBC Micro and other machines contain an SN76489 programmable sound generator, and this demo plays back music sequences recorded on other systems or produced using chip tune trackers such as Deflemask.

All of the VGM files were ported to BBC Micro using a conversion script that transposes VGM files captured on an NTSC SN76489 to be frequency compatible with a 4Mhz BBC Micro SN76489.

Since VGM is a verbose format, the VGM files in the demos were exported from the same script in a compact raw binary format, and then compressed using Exomiser to enable them to be loaded into the limited RAM of a BBC Micro.

For further information see: https://github.com/simondotm/vgm-converter

Build Instructions

• Compiled SSD files are included in the repo
• Requires BeebASM: https://github.com/tom-seddon/beebasm
• Run make.bat on a Windows machine to compile the demos

Credits

• Uses the amazing Exomizer compressor: http://hem.bredband.net/magli143/exo/