{"id":4219,"date":"2013-11-30T22:00:16","date_gmt":"2013-12-01T06:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/?p=4219"},"modified":"2013-12-29T15:22:30","modified_gmt":"2013-12-29T23:22:30","slug":"adding-ay-files-to-the-game-music-website","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/adding-ay-files-to-the-game-music-website\/","title":{"rendered":"Adding AY Files To The Game Music Website"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the first time since I launched the site in the summer of last year, I finally added support for new systems for my Game Music Appreciation<\/a> site: A set of chiptune music files which bear the file extension AY. These files come from games that were on the ZX Spectrum<\/a> and Amstrad CPC<\/a> computer systems.<\/p>\n


\n\"ZX   \"Amstrad
\n<\/center><\/p>\n

Right now, there are over 650 ZX Spectrum games<\/a> in the site while there are all of 20 Amstrad CPC games<\/a>. The latter system seems a bit short-changed, but I read that a lot of Amstrad games were straight ports from the Spectrum anyway since the systems possessed assorted similarities. This might help explain the discrepancy.<\/p>\n

Technically<\/strong>
\nThe AY corpus has always been low hanging fruit due to the fact that the site already supports the format courtesy of the game-music-emu<\/a> backend. The thing that blocked me was that I didn’t know much about these systems. I knew that there were 2 systems (and possibly more) that shared the same chiptune format. Apparently, these machines were big in Europe (I was only vaguely aware of them before I started this project).<\/p>\n

Both the Spectrum and the Amstrad used Zilog Z-80 CPUs for computing and created music using a General Instruments synthesizer chip designated AY-3-8912<\/a>, hence the chiptune file extension AY. This has 3 channels similar to the C64 SID chip. Additionally, there’s a fourth channel that game music emu calls “beeper” (and which Wikipedia describes as “one channel with 10 octaves”). Per my listening, it seems similar to the old PC speaker\/honker. The metadata for a lot of the songs will specify either (AY) or (Beeper).<\/p>\n

Wrangling Metadata<\/strong>
\nLarge collections of AY files are easy to find; as is typical for pure chiptunes, the files are incredibly small.<\/p>\n

As usual, the hardest part of the whole process was munging metadata. There seems to be 2 slightly different conventions for AY metadata, likely from 2 different people doing the bulk of the work and releasing the fruits of their labor into the wild. After I recognized the subtle differences between the 2 formats, it was straightforward to craft a tool to perform most of the work, leaving only a minimum of cleanup effort required afterwards.<\/p>\n

(As an aside, I think this process is called extract – transform – load, or ETL<\/a>. Sounds fancy and complicated, yet it’s technically one of the first computer programming tasks I was ever paid to perform.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Collateral Damage<\/strong>
\nWhile pushing this feature, I managed to break the site’s search engine. The search solution I developed was always sketchy (involving compiling a C program as a static binary CGI script<\/a> and trusting it to run on the server). I will probably need to find a better approach, preferably sooner than later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Game Music Appreciation site now includes .AY chiptune music from ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC computers (whatever those are)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t