# Beepola Help

Contents

Introduction

Keyboard commands

Beeper Engines

- Special FX (Fuzz Click)
- The Music Box
- The Music Studio
- Phaser1
  Interesting Instruments
- Savage
- ROMBeep
- Plip Plop
- Huby
- QChan
- Tritone

Compiling Songs

Ripping Songs

*.bbsong file format

Credits

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.