It's probably been about 10 years ago that I started falling in love, tech-wise, with the tiny & cute yet super-capable PC Engine. Tiny console, game cartridges basically card sized, capable of outputting wonderful pixel art and lovely sound -- AUGH, all so cute! 💖

The sound in particular -- it's more advanced than the NES, and yet, steadier and not nearly as abrasive as the sound could be from the Sega Genesis/MD.

Several years earlier, say at the end of the 20-aughts and the start of the 2010s, I'd been playing around quite a bit with FamiTracker, getting a hang of things like duty-cycle switching and manually-input echoes -- and after really loving what I was hearing from the PC Engine, I was hoping for a chance to see what I could pull off with a tracker that enabled it.

Sad thing is, there weren't really too many options available for Linux x86 -- and even less so for Linux ARM once I made the switch to using Raspberry Pi devices as my daily driver, starting with the Pi 4.

I've been super thankful for tildearrow's Furnace project ( which you, of course, can find documentation at https://github.com/tildearrow/furnace ). I was previously able to get furnace running on the Pi 4 -- but of course, it runs even better on a Pi 5, and it's of course a much-easier install via flatpak and flathub ( and for the few that might be unfamiliar, that's at https://flathub.org/ ).

And, so yeah, after a while of getting reacquainted with sequence trackers, doing a heck of a lot of experimenting with modifying waveform sequences, putting them together in instruments the same way I'd put together different duty cycles in FamiTracker -- yeah, I finally had enough instruments and enough reacquainting to start properly composing stuff at a level I wanted.

And of course it'd have to do with Jon Talbain -- because, of course, what else would you expect from a furry?

I think I'm probably proudest of the trumpet instruments I was able to put together, followed shortly after by the flute. And to think they came about primarily because I was experimenting with sine-wave lengths, thinking about sine waves in the same way one might approach pulse wave lengths with the Konami VRC6, or thinking about how a C64 SID chip might play them. Then I just took portions of those different sine wave lengths to make different trumpet sounds, flute sound, even a saxophone sound which I'll get around to using later.

But yeah, I'm fairly happy with the results.

... oh, and a couple other things, too:

At the beginning of Ending Pt 2, you might notice that the first two channels show a similar effect to what might happen when you put a waveform through Furnace's chorus effect. And indeed, I did watch and learn from it! But, because (to my knowledge) the PC Engine doesn't have its own chorus effect in its hardware, I decided to manually recreate the steps of the waveform over time the best I could, and just transition between those waves in a looping instrument macro.

The sequence waveforms in the synth violin instrument, though, used in Ending Pt 1 (and also in Staff Roll) -- those, I basically just kinda came up with on my own, since I was trying different things to see what might result in a decent violin synth -- and I got the idea of modifying something like a domed square wave. It sounds more like one violin instead of an ensemble -- though maybe with further experience and experimentation, I can figure out what sequence of waveforms I can make to get one channel to sound like multiple.

• Done in Furnace (Linux aarch64 on an RPi5). • Screen-captured with Kooha, the only screen capturer on Flathub that seems to work for me currently. • Edited with Kdenlive.

Recorded at 720p60 because that's the most that my RPi5 seems to be able to reliably do -- but, such a resolution might also be more optimal to make out details on a phone-sized screen.

If you like, my Mastodon feed is at https://woof.tech/@Berto.

#Furnace #PCEngine #HuC6280 #TurboGrafx #TG16 #wavetable #chiptune #demake #Capcom #Darkstalkers #VampireSavior #Cipher