Editing AHX music

 

This is what editing music in AHX format looks like. AHX are small files created in this tracker that gives the tune this unique chiptune vibe to it. In this tracker, however, you can define multiple notes and effects as an instrument itselfl, making those chiptune-like vibrations just by using the final, desired notes in tracker later without any other effects added (if you wish to).

If you want to try it yourself you would need an Amiga computer with hard drive installed or means to run it in software.

1. You need the proper Amiga running for this, I used Amiga 1200,

2. Connect hard drive to it and boot Workbench 3.0 floppy disk installing it on your hard drive,

3. Download AYS-A233.LHA from ahx and extract the archive,

4. Copy extracted files to your Amiga hard drive,

5. When in workbench, open the hard drive, pick view all files from menu (just browse a bit, you will find it),

6. Browse to the directory with AHX installed and double-click AHX-68000 (or AHX-68020 if you have an Amiga with suitable CPU for that),

7. You should be ready to go.

Remember that right mouse click shows menu on Amiga computers.

Sorry for not being detailed enough, I wanted to keep it brief, so you try and figure it out. I think it's always good to learn by trying things by yourself too, not just doing step-by-step instructions.

Also a small update, I minimized the amount of ADs to a minimum, because I hate those lagging sites that even on my Ryzen work like piece of junk... I hope it's OK to keep at least a bit of that content, right? We have those distractors everywhere nowadays... Oh, look... ADD... :)

Allow as low as 1 voice in CoolSoft VirtualMidi Synth

Get rid of CoolSoft VirtualMIDI Synth's hardcoded minimum of 16 voices limit.

So I was previously enjoying the CoolSoft VirtualMIDI ini file hack to allow lower than 16 voices to be set, however, in newest version such ability was completely removed by checking the limit in DLL file as well and overriding the ini set value (unlike previous versions). And I don't want to use outdated version just for this. So I went for an older DLL version which was 32-bit but kept overriding my beautiful voices value of 4, used IDA to show me some assembly, searched for voices and guessed the place (dword and 10h, which means 16, doh). Found it in hex editor and remembered the hex string of that assembly, the most important was 00 00 10 00 00 00, as with x64 assembly is a bit different. Downloaded latest version. But hey, there were a bit more than one 00 00 10 00 00 00, oh well... what's the maximum voices limit? 100 000, so now 100 000 in hexadecimal is? 01 86 A0! Now let's reverse it to have it little endian way. Now let's see if we get 00 00 10 00 00 00 and 00 00 A0 86 01 00 close to each other. Yup, of course there is such a place. And this place, in both EXE and DLL is for voices limit. Vua la, program fixed.

To allow as low as 1 voice in virtualmidi synth do the following:

For version 2.5.3 x64:

- get yourself a hex editor,

- make sure VirtualMIDI Synth is closed and no program is using MIDI (like chrome, steam, any music player) and that VirtualMIDI Synth program is closed,

- navigate to your DRIVE:\Program Files\VirtualMIDISynth,

- edit VirtualMIDISynth.exe in your favourite hex editor,

- change byte 10 [16] at position 3B33 [15 155] to 1 [1],

- navigate to DRIVE:\Windows\system32,

- edit VirtualMIDISynth.dll,

- change byte 10 [16] at position 2507A [151 674] to 1 [1],

- reopen VirtualMIDI Synth and change number of voices to 4 and use chiptune soundfont,

- ????

- enjoy 4 voice channels emulation.

Teenage Engineering Pocket Operator PO-20 Arcade

Small, portable, mobile protracker-like synthesizer PO-20 Arcade with line-in, line-out (headphones), built-in speaker and display powered by 2 AAA batteries.

more demonstration videos at the bottom of this post

This little thing is amazing. It let's You create some cool beats even with Arcade version which is purely designed for chiptunes music. You have 2 octaves for most samples, some are 0-100 finetune range based instead - You control it with left knob. With right knob You alter the filter so the sound is more deep or fading into higher frequencies (kind of like flange effect). You can also do lead in real-time but I'm mostly programming all the patterns as it's very hard to rotate the knob just on the right note - this is unfortunately a con in this model that You can't use buttons in Note mode. Other models have this feature. You can program max 128-chain of patterns and chords which allows to achieve around 6-7 minutes of programmed music as long as You stick to low BPM like 60 and use 120 BPM beats. The max BPM is 240. A limit of 16 positions per pattern is a bit low but then You can use step multiplier which allows You to pick 2, 3, 4, 6 and 8 multiplier modes for a note witch can quite well overcome this limit. You can also easily copy a pattern so adding new instrument lines is very easy. Unfortunately You can't connect it to PC through USB port or similar to transfer Your creation in ProTracker-like form so if You want to keep the chiptune in mod format You would pretty much need to recreate it there. Nonetheless the device allows You to feel how the ProTracker-like music can be creater by showing You how to arrange your notes to play accordingly to given chord.

The device features:

• a clock
• an alarm
• 2 octaves (A-1 to A-3)
• 0-100 filter effect per note
• 16 samples
• 16 patterns
• 16 chords
• 16 live effects
• 16 volume settings
• 128-chains
• parameter locking
• a drone sound
• fade out
• tempo and swing
• step multiplier
• copying and clearing a pattern
• various sync modes with left-right audio channel splitting
• built-in speaker (I didn't know about that before buying! Nice feature!)
• powered by 2 AAA batteries (mine rechargeable usually last 2-3 days)

Here are some examples of the music I was able to create by purely improvising:

House:

Rave:

Standard chiptune-like loop:

Techno Club:

Different bpm-swing variation of the above video, for demonstration purposes:

• 60 bpm setting (120 real) / 80 swing

• 65 bpm setting (130 real) / 50 swing

• 90 bpm setting (180 real) / 50 swing

If you want to acquire this device (or a set of them) check out the product page: https://teenageengineering.com/products/po. They sure let you forget about the world around you when you step into music creation mode. :)

If you live in Poland or countries nearby, at this moment it's best to buy it from Czech distributor Kytary: https://kytary.pl/Search/?term=pocket%20operator. They offer reasonable prices and ship with DHL (select PPL as transportation method) and allow paying with Paypal.

7-ZIP finetuner

Small application to try various 7-ZIP settings to find best combination for given input data. This usually results in smaller archive size.

Help:

7-ZIP Finetuner v1.00 by Mr_KrzYch00

This program will test various 7-ZIP switches known to improve

compression ratio. Smallest resulting file will be kept on disk.

Usage: 7zft [switches] [input files ...] [archive name]

Switches:

   /l#      - 7z executable (default: "c:\program files\7-zip\7z.exe")

   /d#      - dictionary size (default: 512m)

   /s#      - solid block size (default: on)

   /m#      - match finder cycles (default: 4294967295)

This program is provided as-is, use at Your own risk.

Support the author: https://www.paypal.me/MrKrzYch00

Optimization sample:

f:\MyScripts\7z test>7zft Ht_edf_v1 Ht_edf_v1

7-ZIP Finetuner v1.00 by Mr_KrzYch00

LC: 3, LP: 0, PB: 2, YX: 5, FB: 273 (INITIAL RUN) - best: 1372745

LC: 1, LP: 0, PB: 2, YX: 5, FB: 273 - best: 1372697  (-48)

LC: 2, LP: 0, PB: 2, YX: 5, FB: 273 - best: 1372483  (-214)

LC: 1, LP: 1, PB: 2, YX: 5, FB: 273 - best: 1372441  (-42)

LC: 0, LP: 2, PB: 2, YX: 5, FB: 273 - best: 1372264  (-177)

LC: 0, LP: 0, PB: 3, YX: 5, FB: 273 - best: 1372248  (-16)

LC: 1, LP: 0, PB: 3, YX: 5, FB: 273 - best: 1372061  (-187)

LC: 1, LP: 1, PB: 3, YX: 5, FB: 273 - best: 1371695  (-366)

LC: 0, LP: 1, PB: 4, YX: 5, FB: 273 - best: 1371445  (-250)

LC: 1, LP: 1, PB: 4, YX: 5, FB: 273 - best: 1371404  (-41)

LC: 1, LP: 1, PB: 4, YX: 5, FB: 272 - best: 1371393  (-11)

LC: 1, LP: 1, PB: 4, YX: 5, FB: 269 - best: 1371342  (-51)

LC: 1, LP: 1, PB: 4, YX: 5, FB: 260 - best: 1371305  (-37)

LC: 1, LP: 1, PB: 4, YX: 5, FB: 253 - best: 1371303  (-2)

LC: 1, LP: 1, PB: 4, YX: 5, FB: 252 - best: 1371115  (-188)

LC: 1, LP: 1, PB: 4, YX: 5, FB: 172 - best: 1371084  (-31)

LC: 1, LP: 1, PB: 4, YX: 5, FB: 155 - best: 1371069  (-15)

LC: 1, LP: 1, PB: 4, YX: 5, FB: 141 - best: 1371010  (-59)

LC: 1, LP: 1, PB: 4, YX: 5, FB: 134 - best: 1370992  (-18)

LC: 1, LP: 1, PB: 4, YX: 5, FB: 125 - best: 1370980  (-12)

LC: 1, LP: 1, PB: 4, YX: 5, FB: 121 - best: 1370964  (-16)

LC: 1, LP: 1, PB: 4, YX: 5, FB: 70 - best: 1370908  (-56)

LC: 1, LP: 1, PB: 4, YX: 5, FB: 68 - best: 1370846  (-62)

LC: 1, LP: 1, PB: 4, YX: 5, FB: 63 - best: 1370812  (-34)

LC: 1, LP: 1, PB: 4, YX: 5, FB: 54 - best: 1370781  (-31)

LC: 1, LP: 1, PB: 4, YX: 5, FB: 52 - best: 1370756  (-25)

LC: 1, LP: 1, PB: 4, YX: 5, FB: 5              

    SUMMARY:

- Size: 1370756

- LC: 1

- LP: 1

- PB: 4

- Method: LZMA2

- YX: 5

- FB: 52

You can download it from: http://virtual.4my.eu

Zopfli on Odroid XU4

Lately I got myself Odroid XU4 microcomputer based on Exynoss 5422 octa core (4x 2Ghz + 4x 1.4Ghz). Surprisingly it can run all 8 cores simultaneously. Unfortunately its size is a bit bigger than Odroid U3 so if You made Yourself some custom made multi-odroid chassis, You would need to rebuild it if You plan to put XU4 in there as well. I mainly bought it to have headless OS with Zopfli KrzYmod running on, doing 999,999 iterations per block. I can confirm that it's around 50% faster than Odroid U3, with single threaded zopfli compression. In my small test of compressing a file using multi-threaded compression it was 55% faster than Odroid U3 O/Ced at 1.92Ghz (limited to 6 threads and various block sizes so it couldn't show its full potential, which I would believe could be up to 75% faster).

Unfortunately it's getting up to 95*C temperature when using all 4 big cores + 1-2 small cores, when small cores are not used the temperature goes to 93*C max. I'm now waiting for Grizzly Kryonaut thermal paste to arrive to apply it on all my RPis and Odroids (and later to apply better cooling solutions in case that won't help much) to make sure they won't get throttled much, especially during summer here.

There is also the same problem that occurs on Odroid U3 being SIGSEGVs with zopfli when long running certain blocks of data. The kernel seems newer on Odroid XU4, so I'm still confused by this error as it is not occurring with x86/x64 builds, might be GCC to generate bogus compilation, or one of the special switches I pass to it for faster builds.

Some tests:

                |       ORIGINAL -O2                   |  Mr_KrzYch00's Zopfli KrzYmod  |
       X        |-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
                | 2016.04.20 | 2016.05.19 | Makefile*  | v16.5.22 --t0 | v16.5.22 --t99 |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
           real | 15m35.201s | 14m6.836s  | 11m21.864s | 10m56.287s    | 7m11.551s      | - ARM Cortex-A9 - quad @ 1.92Ghz
Odroid U3  user | 14m40.965s | 14m6.480s  | 11m21.580s | 10m55.970s    | 19m30.025s     | (quad-core)
NEON       sys  | 0m53.925s  | 0m0.125s   | 0m0.095s   | 0m0.135s      | 0m0.805s       |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
           real |            |            |            | 7m21.517s     | 4m40.129s      | - ARM Cortex-A7 - quad @ 1.4Ghz
Odroid XU4 user | [missing]  | [missing]  | [missing]  | 7m21.345s     | 8m27.750s      | - ARM Cortex-A15 - quad @ 2.0Ghz
NEON+VFPV4 sys  |            |            |            | 0m0.080s      | 0m0.180s       | (octa-core)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
           real | 7m41.104s  | 5m50.010s  | 4m31.952s  | 4m1.706s      | 2m35.052s      | - Core i7-3630QM @ 2.7Ghz
Fedora x86 user | 7m20.247s  | 5m39.968s  | 4m24.474s  | 3m53.982s     | 6m27.671s      | (quad core)
rawhideAVX sys  | 0m9.306s   | 0m0.242s   | 0m0.071s   | 0m0.268s      | 0m2.843s       |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
           real | 5m59.811s  | 4m25.060s  | 3m38.561s  | 3m31.905s     | 2m17.897s      |
Fedora x64 user | 5m56.214s  | 4m24.860s  | 3m38.295s  | 3m31.776s     | 5m57.761s      |
rawhideAVX sys  | 0m3.543s   | 0m0.118s   | 0m0.208s   | 0m0.056s      | 0m1.636s       |


* - same original Zopfli 2016.05.19 with Zopfli KrzYmod's makefile + profile guided optimizations:
        https://github.com/MrKrzYch00/zopfli/blob/master/Makefile
  --t99 is to force all blocks compression at once - 6 threads used

Fedora rawhide kernel panic Virtualbox

I'm now running on a very slow PC being disassembled Asus 1215N with O/Ced Atom CPU to 2.35Ghz. As far as I managed to upgrade windows 7 to x64 version I can not make magically VT-x appear on this CPU, that was the reason why I ran into problems when tried to boot Fedora rawhide i686 in Virtualbox. Basically the problem occurs with kernels versioned 4.7+, it seems to boot fine with 4.6 one. On Virtualbox forums there was some discussion that it may be related to virtual box display driver from virtualbox extension pack being installed (and of course VT-x being unavailable making I/O APIC option not performing correctly without it - or so I believe after I did my tests). So far I have it running with kernel 4.6 and dnf-ing around the OS, that takes ages due to slowness caused by no VT-x being available. If I find a way on how to run kernel 4.9 with my configuration, I will share this information.

And here is some interesting stuff with DNF, it can even erase "None", lol:

Chrome/Chromium hangs often

Recently I ran into a problem when my Chromium browser was hanging a lot when I activated the window or few seconds after opening new tab. First I VACUUM-ed every SQLite file in my profile directory... Didn't help... Then I run procmon tool to show me what exactly was it doing on my harddrive, then I found out it was reading some files, so I went through every one of them, renaming them by adding .bak extension. And then vua la, I found out what was causing it. It turns out it was Preferences file growing too big (even though it was just 450KB) when You visited a lot of various sites in the past, as it saves some preferences for every one of them and the engine/parts of code to read it back and analyze seem to be very inefficient, not to say, shitty. So imo that part requires some kind of inspection to be performed by Chromium/Chrome DEVs as currently it's giving Chromium even 1 minute hangs every now and then.

To fix Chrome/Chromium hangs:

- close all running instances of Chrome/Chromium,

- go to Your Chrome/Chromium Default profile, usually %LocalAppData%\Chromium\User Data\Default for Windows users,

- find Preferences file,

- rename it to Preferences.bak or remove it,
- run Chrome/Chromium,
- lags/hangs should be gone now,
- in case they are not, You may be having some other problematic file that, maybe, uses JSON format to store data as well. In other words its structure should be having a lot of { } " " : chars as well, maybe the other one got too big for You?

You may have some settings reset to default like Chrome/Chromium asking to be default browser or having Translate messages scaring You a lot, unfortunately, You must get past it again now. :)