"Is this a solo instrument?"
"I like to think of it like a saxophone. It's great for playing your heart out alone and can really rock when it's got drums and other instruments with it."
"All you can make are square waves."
"no. Square waves look like this:"
"And have this spectrum:"
"Square waves are a subset of 1-bit waveforms. 1-Bit waveforms look like this:"
"All you can make is pulse width waveforms."
"no. Pulse Width waveforms look like this:"
"And have these spectra:"
"How many steps and tracks are in the sequencer?"
"It has 32 steps on 4 tracks. "Track 1 is for waveform. Track 2 is for pitch. Track 3 is for effect parameter #1. Track 4 is for effect parameter #2."
"What a minute, the original 2600 didn't have effects, did it?"
"No. This is another place we're innovating. 1 Bit Effects."
"What effects are available?"
"There is 1-bit ring mod (with variable depth), a 1-bit comb filter and a 1-bit State Variable Filter which can be used for high-, low- or bandpass. Vibrato and Tremolo are in the works."
"How many voices are there?"
"One."
"Is there MIDI?"
"No. No MIDI Sync. No MIDI Controllers. No MIDI Note Messages. No Sysex."
"Could MIDI be added?"
"Yes, actually. See the Hardware Modification section. Going MIDI-less is a tradeoff. It simplifies the design, makes it lighter, cheaper, and easier to build and debug. It makes the software shorter and less complex. These are all good things. Incorporating MIDI increases the time before you get to play music because one must network several pieces of equipment. It makes the music a little less spontaneous. Without expensive wireless interfaces, it makes you have a cable connected to your instrument, which makes you a little less flexible in your movement."
"Is there a VST Plug-in I could download instead?"
"No. VST Plug-ins are neat technology, but they encourage you to sit behind a computer staring at a screen."
"What other advantages are there to 1-bit synthesis?"
"It's easy to synthesize, compress and amplify. For example, the amplifier doesn't have to be an op-amp, a simple transistor will do, because the synth is only ever outputing two values. The synthesis doesn't tax the microcontroller at all. In fact, the algorithm is very well suited to FPGAs or CPLDs because most of the computational register widths are 1-bit."
"What other Atari sounding things are there?"
"Carrera. LoopCart"
"What is different about this from Atari 2600?"
"Atari 2600 is only able to produce about 8 different waveforms. As a matter of fact, here's what they are (from the web):"
Waveform : 001010000111011
Waveform : 001010000111011->0100000000000000000100000000000 (465 bits long)
001010000111011->0010110011111000110111010100001 (465 bits long)
Waveform : 01
Waveform : 0010110011111000110111010100001
Waveform : 1111111111111000000000000000000
Waveform : 511 bits long (white noise)
Waveform : 1111111111111000000000000000000
Waveform : 0010110011111000110111010100001
"The 1 Bit Groove Box uses the same 1 Bit Technique, but includes all possible 1-bit waveforms. There are thousands of different 1-bit waveforms, for lots of expressive power."
"also, the 1 Bit Groove Box can be tuned to any scale. The default is a 5 octave chromatic scale. It's accurate, not like the original 2600, so that beautiful, not just quirky music can be written with it."
"What is the problem with the original 2600 scale?"
"It has a very limited divider range. Only 32 steps. Basically, it can only play one octave well. The next octave is limited to a subset of the Phrygian mode, as this brilliant paper points out.
"Since I can modify the scale and waveforms by changing the software, can I make this exactly emulate the Atari 2600?"
"Yes. For purity, run the Synthesizer ISR at 30KHz. You might also want to put a low-pass filter on to emulate the bandwidth of a television."