@tdg8934 SO I have started at the top and counted downwards the notes (which I think would represent the track or channel of notes from left to right). I counted 23 rows notes downward. Well this goes beyond the 16 channels so it looks like it wont work anyway. There are actually more than 23 rows but the 23 rows represents the rows (track/channels) with actual notes in them.
Ideas?
@tdg8934 I think you're on the right track-- excuse the pun :D Here is how I would solve this problem.
Let's start with the overworld song.
Listen to it very carefully. Focus your mind exclusively on the main melody, and just roll with it, humming along.Unless you have very strange vocal cords indeed, you can only hum one "channel", and your brain is naturally going to hum the sets of notes you need to focus on, to produce the spirit of the song. That is what you're going to want to reproduce first.
Now, try to find an actual MIDI file of the song. Remember, the Amiga sound chip only had four channels, so the song can't have used more than that. The reason you're seeing so many in your tool, is because of pollution from having converted an mp3 file.
Load the should-be-four-channels-only MIDI file into the web site or your other tool, and watch the playback very carefully-- one of those channels is going to be carrying the water for that melody you've been humming. On the web site, you can even pause and click on each note-- "yes, yes, that's the note for this part!"
That channel, once you identify it, is what you're going to want in the array first.
Once you get that playing back in Fuze via my code, my guess is that it'll already sound pretty good, if not slightly too empty. So, I'd pick the heaviest accompanying chord channel, and plug that one in next-- at that point. I bet the song sounds "good enough", and you can move on to the next one.
David Joiner is a famous enough composer that I'm sure there are MIDI files of his work out there somewhere!
Apparently David Joiner went on to make a music creation software called music X, and music from faery tale adventure was included. If you fire up music X on an emulator, it should be clear enough to read and transcribe. Probably?
@toxibunny that is the Key!
I have an Amiga emulator I bought along with a C64 one on my laptop (the good one). I know I can find the Music-X software too. Now the tricky part will be if I can save the FTA music in midi format and get it moved over to my laptop to be recognized by my PPV audio programs.
Wonderful find.
@Spacemario @toxibunny I found Music-X 1.0 and 2.0 online and both of them work somewhat with Amiga Forever emulator software on my laptop. However Music X 1.0 has a disk 3 with additional *.PERF files (Performance? music file format). One of them has all of the Faery Tale Adventure sequences which look like they are in 4 colored tracks. However, when I play it there is no sound. Other Perf files work fine and some do not. I got a screen capture of the Intro sequence.
Here by the colors, I can clearly see the track/channels. However, other programs I downloaded are not apparent on what is in track 1, 2, 3....
I can see some similarities in the Amiga Music-X 2.0 screen capture and the PC Anthem Score (30 day trial) screen capture. What I don't see is where the tracks are in Anthem Score software since they are not color coded. How would I start listing this in the Fuze music file arrays? I'm not getting this. I have searched all the other known Amiga music programs and none of them play the *.Perf music format. Ideas?
Lots of painful transscribing?
@Spacemario @toxibunny @vinicity
Thanks to everyone!
I finally figured it all out for now. Luckily there was an edit mode in the Amiga Music-X with the un-hearable Faery Tale Adventure sequences that lists the notes, timing, etc I needed in Fuze for playing the notes.
I have 4 channels working in my FTA like game playing the 1st 8 of 25 music sections (4 whole notes * 8) of the FTA Intro song. I will have to spend time to enter in the rest of the sections (9-25) at a later date. And the do it all over again for the rest of the FTA sequences listed (ie main theme, fight theme, etc). It sounds so weird with the Fuze wave types (sine, sawtooth, etc) but the intro melody is playing correctly.
I even have it triggered to play a different melody when the character enters the house and then go back to the original melody when he leaves the house.
Now it’s just putting in the time for the remaining FTA sequences melodies notes.
@tdg8934 That's awesome, congratulations! It must feel good to finally conquer this one-- the nice part is that now you have a way to play "chip" music in your future Fuze projects too.
Incidentally, those Amiga screenshots are amazing: software had so much more character in those days. Compare the Amiga program to that Windows app screenshot of yours-- the latter looks so cheap and generic.
Ok next part to work on is to create sprite tiles. I found this excerpt from David Joiner (Talin) about FTA.
https://medium.com/@dreamertalin/the-faery-tale-adventure-a-personal-history-4fae0617a18d
However, I knew that I would not be able to draw a world that huge. So I came up with the idea of ‘meta-tiles’ or ‘super-tiles’. You see, most games in that era used ‘tiled’ artwork — that is, the background consists of square, 2-dimensional bitmaps which could be re-used many times within a single scene. I hit on the idea of creating ‘super-tiles’ which were made up of smaller tiles. Each tile was 16 x 32 pixels, and each super-tile was 16 x 8 tiles, for a total of 256 x 256 pixels. This allowed me to create vast amounts of terrain with only modest amounts of memory — the final overland map was roughly 100 screens wide and 150 screens tall.
So this explains how the 17k screens is arranged and the tiles. Time to look at the Fuze image editor
Here are the 16x32 tiles that David Joiner used made into his Super Tile (16x8) totaling 256x256 pixels for each screen Of which he had 100 different screens wide by 150 screens tall.
You can also see a 16x32 man sprite I created from an online tutorial I found.
How do I get privileges to share videos so users can see and hear (FTA Intro and FTA Day music through notes) my progress?
@tdg8934 You can't upload videos directly but you can link to them on Twitter or Youtube
@pianofire thank you .
I have made a little more progress but these videos show the details and play the 2 FTA note songs
FTA noted songs: Intro and Daytime
Code listing (just to show how long this is) - wait for my granddaughter Unexpected message at
Or try this: https://www.youtube.com/user/codenamegreen1
@tdg8934 Hah, that is absolutely crazy-- phenomenal work, amazing!
I'm not a big fan of the white noise channel though-- is that supposed to be white noise?
In my play music code, there is a way to control which melody type is being used-- try flipping it to the one which does two melody channels, versus one melody and one white noise. It might even be called "melodyTypeTwo"?
@tdg8934 Your Youtube links were shortened and for some reason don't display properly. If you paste them in to the browser address bar it expands them and that is what you need to put in your posts (I have fixed these for you)
@tdg8934 that's a lot of notes i'd just use the root notes and copy the root notes with a bass and have accompanying notes to high light the melody 4 channels, but i like how in depth your going .
@pianofire The videos work now. Thank you!
@Spacemario thank you for your kind words. I have changed around the instruments (ie saw) or melody channels for the best sound so all the channels (0-3? are heard) but I can keep playing with it. Currently I’m working on the GUI menus at the bottom .
Sticking to 4 channels is probably going to give it a nice retro sound. Like pixel art, but for your ears!
@tdg8934 You should do a new video-- I'd love to hear the overworld song, but sounding correct with all of the channels :D
@tdg8934 That's awesome, congratulations! It must feel good to finally conquer this one-- the nice part is that now you have a way to play "chip" music in your future Fuze projects too.
Incidentally, those Amiga screenshots are amazing: software had so much more character in those days. Compare the Amiga program to that Windows app screenshot of yours-- the latter looks so cheap and generic.
