Note, to playback stereo sample, this video was using audio feed from x16emu.exe , there has been a slight bug on R44 emulator's FM playback with the resampling part, this demo video is generated with a R44 emu, expect a better quality of FM when playing back with Furnace.
This is the first song to hit the 2MB (2000KiB) ZSM size barrier, and it's not the samples, the samples ONLY about 400K, it's the PSG FM events that are too F...A...T.
At 2018KiB, the melodius program would lock up, the final release candidate 7 is at 2014KiB, right on the edge!
Without the sample, it's already 1.7MiB (candidate.1) big.
Had to cut things to fit in the RAM, went through multiple (well 8) iterations to get to this.
Stereo sound! Stereo sample playback!
You like the drums? Do they sound spacious to you? Great!
I had to manually patch the stereo samples to the .zsm, Furnace tracker doesn't support the stereo samples playback like OpenMPT do, it was fun, highly recommended.
Until you had to do it repeatedly to test out. then it was not fun.
You like the guitar? well, great, I tried my best to capture the essentials.
I was intended to use Thunder Force IV guitar patch, a Saga MegaDrive game uses YM2612 , but it's a bit thin for this track, then I look into recreating the instrument myself, used a lot of LFO(software and hardware) to get close to the real distorted guitar, which should give a natural osculation of amplitude and frequency, I haven't pull up a scope to check the harmonics characteristic versus the real guitar, but it sound close enough.
The guitar is made up with two instrument patches, one is less distorted, almost piano sounding, handling the bassline of the track,
The other is more distorted.
At this point, I still missing some of the lower frequency part, thus I throw a C major chord on every guitar key, make sure the fundamental is the most audible, and detune the keys so it won't just muddle with the fundamental key, and the output not only sound closer to a disto.gt, looks closer to its waveform on the Oscilloscope too.
But the latter Lead guitar if played with this patch, it will be incoherent to listing to, thus a third guitar patch was created to punch through the mix, this time I went with TF_4 style guitar.
Then the guitar would distort way out of control on higher notes. On OPL3, the AdLib card Sound blaster card YMF262, this would be simple to fix by turning on the KSR, but on YM2151, I had to manually lower the operator's levels when playing at a higher note.
That's the part where I discovered I only left 300K to work with, thus the PSG part of the song is the most underutilized part I have ever created.
Also, the 3rd patch had to turn off the OP2's software LFO, to save space for samples. There was a difference, but you did hear it, so it doesn't count.
PSG13,14 was trimmed to fit in RAM. Hence sometimes only PSG15 is playing.
There's no auto-trim on samples, so I trimmed them.
On the spectrum graph, the peak frequency of the samples used was at 15.5Khz, thus resampled at 277767hz to get the smaller size while losing basically noting.
And there are many mods I can't think of for now to get it under the limit.
Executive Treatment,
Refence from Sponge-bob, at this instance, it's describing this version is somewhat "Lite". There are things I should put in but due the size limit I didn't.
The modifications,
I tweak-ified the song based on how I perceived the song, in short, it's the part where I think the author is expressing but not put in the finish product, I hope it isn't too bad.
And it's not random D'n'b I throw in, it's Jungle(150BPM)
This has been a many-nights of work, many thanks to MooingLemur Natt Akuma m00dawg(not in sequence), for technical details of the system, and the kind folks in Commander X16 discord/Forum.
GTR3QQ 2023 Rafał Wiosna (Raf, https://www.modules.pl/index.php?id=modules&aid=712) 1992
This cover is licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0
Free to use it more!
