Re: [hatari-devel] FW: Stereo YM2149

[Nicolas Pomarède <npomarede@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Le 25/09/2015 16:08, Konador, Cyprian a écrit :
> Hi All,
>
> There is a cool stereo modification for ST: http://rdemming.home.xs4all.nl/Atari/StereoST/ I would say that YM in stereo sound really cool.
> Under Windws/Linux you can check that with Ay_Emul http://bulba.untergrund.net/emulator_e.htm . It can play in stereo chiptunes in YM2, YM5 and YM6 format.
>
> What do you think about adding that YM stereo into Hatari?

Hi

I know this modification, a similar one was in French ST Magazine more 
than 20 years ago, and I modified my STF to support it :)

As for adding it to Hatari, I don't really know ; the problem is that 
musics were not composed with stereo in mind, so in some cases one 
instrument will play on voice A, then voice B , then ...

So if you decide to mix A+B on left and B+C on right, results are likely 
to vary a lot. Some songs will sound good, some will sound weird. It's 
nearly impossible to find a unique combination for all cases, so that 
would need quite some changes in the UI to do your own L/R mixing.

But then, a much more annoying problem is that sample sound will not 
sound correct after that, because replays expect to mix the 3 voices 
into one mono output to get the best possible result with only 16 levels 
of volume per voice. If you split into L/R, then you will get 2 parts of 
the same sample on each L/R channel, but with lowered quality.

All in all, from my own STF experience with this modification, although 
it looked cool at first, some musics will sound nice, but some will 
sound worse and in the end I'm not sure it's worth the trouble for 
Hatari (except is someone is willing to send a patch for this :) )

It's sure we can add a lot a filter / effects for sound that were not in 
the original HW, but this requires time and in my case I prefer 
improving accuracy for now :)

Nicolas