Atari Sound Forger (v0.82 beta)

This is meant as a fun real-time tool for exploring Atari 2600 Sounds and recording loops you can then play back on an Atari

Using "mapping sets", standard atari voices are mapped to the computer keyboard, allowing quick play as with a regular synth keyboard.

Some mapping sets draw from different Atari voices, and some will display a mapping to the a "regular" piano keyboard when available. (Tuning the Atari is a tricky thing :-) )

You can create your own mapping sets as well.

Future plans include recording timing information and generating batari Basic samples.

Loops

batari Basic code

Mapping Sets are arrays of JSON and pretty straightforward:

                        desc - description
                        keyboard - currently ignored, set to 'us' for now
                        key2tfm - an map of keyboard keys to Atari tone, frequency, and piano note
                                  (note, octave, then maybe sharp, i.e. e2 or f3# )
                                  (piano note for display purposes only...)
                                  t: tone (voice used)
                                  f: frequency
                                  p: piano note
                                  v: volume (optional, defaults to 8, ignored by js but used in batari Basic listing)

                    

Current Mappings

(warning: / key leads to bad results on Firefox)

Admittedly I think these are all using NTSC values.

This work relies heavily on other people in the Atari dev community, especially Random Terrain who allowed me to use the Atari 2600 sound clips he painstakingly recorded.

Many of the ideas here were first shown in Visual batari Basic and rely on Eckhard Stolberg's work.

Using Pizzicato.js as the webkit sound library.

Source code open for pull requests at github.com/kirkjerk/atari-sound-forger