Beepola Help

Beeper Engines

Beepola supports the following beeper engines. Each has its own unique sound, and its own advantages and disadvantages.

Special FX Beeper Engine

• Supports note sustain settings
  
• 2 tone channels
  
• 1 percussion channel, with 4 percussion sounds.   

Phaser1 Beeper Engine

• Full 5 octaves for both tone channels
  
• Channel 2 is a programmable phasing synthesiser, allowing up to 100 unique instruments per song
  
• 1 percussion channel, with either 8 high-quality digitally sampled percussion sounds, or 9 synthesised drum sounds available
• Has none of the detuning effects that are present in many other beeper engines.

The Music Box Beeper Engine

• Small player routine (approx. 217 bytes, depending upon the features selected at compile time)
• 2 tone channels
• Fixed note lengths, and the fact that it does not use an Interrupt Service Routine mean that this tone generator is well suited for producing 2 channel in-game music. The "play next note" routine call be called at regular intervals from within a main game loop, or from an IM2 interrupt routine, to achieve song playback while a game or other code is running.
• Clean-sounding square wave tones.

The Music Studio Beeper Engine

• Small player routine (approx. 214 bytes, depending upon the features selected at compile time)
• 2 channels, one of which may contain percussion
• 13 percussion sounds
• Sawtooth-style synthesized tones.
• Fixed note lengths, and the fact that it does not use an Interrupt Service Routine mean that this tone generator is well suited for producing 2 channel in-game music. The "play next note" routine call be called at regular intervals from within a main game loop, or from an IM2 interrupt routine, to achieve song playback while a game or other code is running.

The Savage Beeper Engine

• 2 tone channels
• 1 percussion channel with 5 drum sounds
• Ornaments (up to 31 unique ornaments per song)
• Glissando effect (range of 255 possible values) for both channels
• Skew and skew XOR effects to change the timbre of the sounds for both channels   
• FX effect to support a range of addition sound effects for each channel.

The ROMBeep Engine

• Uses the Spectrum BEEP ROM routine to generate pseudo 2 channel sound using argeggios.
• Small player code.
• Player routine can be run from contended memory. This is the only beeper engine supported by Beepola that will sound undistorted on a 16K Spectrum.

The Plip Plop Engine

• Single tone channel of sawtooth-wave melody.
• 4 Drum sounds.
• Configurable pitch bend rate up/down.

The Huby Engine

• 2 tone channels
• 1 percussion sound (replaces the note on Channel 1).
• Manual note detuning capability.
• Tiny replay routine (around 100 bytes) and very compact data format make this engine ideal for game music where memory space for music is  limited.

The QChan Engine

• 4 tone channels
• 1 percussion channel with 12 sounds.
• Per-channel volume controls.
• Per-pattern note sustain settings.
• No significant tuning issues.

The Tritone Engine

• 3 tone channels
• 1 percussion channel with 24 sounds.
• Manual note detuning capability.
• Skew effects to change the timbre of individual notes.
• Two player versions included:- one with a different volume level for each channel, and a second with equal volume levels.