dos33fsprogs/chiptune_player/README.chiptune

Challenges found writing an Apple II chiptune player
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
   by DEATER (Vince Weaver, vince@deater.net)

  http://www.deater.net/weave/vmwprod/chiptune/
====================================================

GOAL:
~~~~~
  The goal is to design a chiptune player that can play large 
  (150k+ uncompressed) chiptune files on an Apple II with 48k of RAM
  and a Mockingboard sound card.

  You in theory could have had an Apple II with 48k in 1977 (if you were rich)
  and Mockingboards came around 1981, so this all predates the Commodore 64.

USING:
~~~~~~
   Boot disk on a real system, or emulator with Mockingboard support.

   Applewin works fine (even under Wine on Linux).
   MESS does too, it's harder to setup (ROMs) but the audio sounds clearer.

   Space pauses, Left/Right arrow switches songs.

   You can load up your own YM5 files.  Get the "ym5_to_krw" utility found in
   the repository https://github.com/deater/vmw-meter/
   Copy the files to the disk image, and edit the filenames in chiptune.s
   (sorry, don't have code that CATALOGs automatically.  TODO?)

HARDWARE:
~~~~~~~~~

  Sound
  =====

  The Mockingboard card has two AY-3-8910 chips, each interfaced with a
  VIA 6522 I/O chip.  The 6522 more or less acts as a GPIO expander, plus
  provides programmable timer interrupts (something the Apple II lacks).

  The AY-3-8910 chip provides three channels of square waves, plus noise.
  There is also a (global) envelope generator (though it's typically 
  not used that much).  The Mockingboard has two AY-3-8910s, 
  so you can have up to six channels of sound (3 on right, 3 on left).

  Processor
  =========

  The Apple II has a 6502 processor running at 1.023 MHz.

  RAM
  ===

  You could get Apple IIs with as little as 4k of RAM.  Eventually models
  with 48k, 64k and 128k were popular, but due to I/O and ROM constraints to
  access more than 48k you had to do bank switching.

  DISK
  ====

  The typical 5 1/4" floppy was single sided and by the time of DOS3.3 held
  140k of data.  Roughly 16k was used by DOS though if you wanted a bootable
  disk.  There are all kinds of ways you can cheat and extend this, as well
  as using a "real" O/S like ProDOS.  However growing up all I ever really
  used was DOS3.3 so I'm using it for the sake of tradition.

  Also if you want to run DOS3.3 then RAM from $9600 up through $C000 is
  used by the O/S.  For this project I use stock DOS3.3 so we lose that
  amount of RAM (almost 11k).

SOUND DATA:
~~~~~~~~~~~

The AY-3-8910 chips are very flexible and can be programmed in a wide
variety of ways.

I'm attempting to play YM files, which are chiptune files popular in
the Atari and Spectrum communities.  These are RAW register dumps;
every 50Hz (they tend to be European) the contents of the 14 AY-3-8910
registers are written.  A raw data stream is 700 bytes (50*14) a second,
so 42k per minute.  This means holding a raw, uncompressed, data stream
in RAM becomes a challenge.

COMPRESSION:
~~~~~~~~~~~~

The register values tend to be repetitive so they compress well.  Especially
if you interleave the files (have all of the register 0 data in a row,
followed by all the data for register 1, etc.  This is a lot harder to play
but you can get compression ratios of over 10 times, see the chart
at the end of this document).

In addition, the file data can be compressed even more if you notice unused
bits in the data.  For example, the register data has many unused bits (the
period data is only 12 bits for each channel).  Also many songs do not use
the envelope feature at all, freeing up 3 bytes.  So custom compression that
can make assumptions about the sound format can free up many bytes even in
a raw register dump format.

A typical ym5 file is compressed with LHA compression which isn't practical
for compression.

The LZ4 algorithm is nearly as good and has existing 6502 implementations 
which can be adapted.  It isn't really a streaming algorithm though, so
it is hard to decompress only a chunk of the file at a time, usually you
need to decompress the whole file at once (the format works by referencing
bit sequences from earlier decompressed data).  

This is especially troublesome with interleaved files, as although they
compress really well, you end up decompressing all of the register-0
data before you get to register-1 so with limited RAM you have to 
change how you deal with things.

KRW File Format
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I ended up creating yet another sound file format, and wrote a converter
that can convert YM5 files to this KRW format.

The format assumes you take the raw interleaved data, and then break it
up into 768 byte * 14 register (10.5k) chunks.  These chunks are compressed
independently and concatenated together.  The player then decompresses
these chunks one by one as it pays through the song.  The compression
ratio is not as good as compressing the entire file, but it allows most
reasonable-length ym5 files to be played.

The format is as follows:
	3 bytes		Magic Number	KRW
	1 byte		Skip Value	Bytes to skip to get to first LZ4 data
	1 byte		Title Center	Spaces to print to center on 40col
	X bytes		Title String	0-terminated ASCII Title of song
	1 byte		Author Center
	X bytes		Author String
	1 byte		Time Center	
	14 bytes	Time String	" 0:00 /  M:SS\0" with length filled in
Repeated block data
	2 bytes		Chunk Length	Little Endian size of LZ4 block
	X bytes		LZ4 data

After last block, a value of 0/0 indicates end

	For proper end-of-song detection, the file data should be interleaved
	and the data at the end should be padded with all $FF characters.

	End of song is detected by an FF in register[1] which in theory
	is not possible in a valid register dump.


PLAYING THE SONG
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  An interrupt routine wakes at 50Hz to write the registers and a few other
  housekeeping things.

  We load the KRW file totally into RAM before playing.

  The Disk II controller designed by Woz is amazing, but it is timing
  sensitive so interrupts are disabled when loading from disk.

  We have to have room in RAM for the player (4k) the KRW file (16k)
  and the current uncompressed data (14k).  See the memory map diagram
  at the end.

  We also have some visualization going on that plots the amplitude of
  the three channels, plus has a rasterbar type thing going on in the
  background.  Originally the graphics was done full speed in a loop outside
  the interrupt handler, but as we'll see due to glitchy audio we had to
  do some hackish things.

  The actual player is fairly simple, just reads the interleaved data by
  striding through memory and writing out to the registers.  A frame only
  takes maybe 2400 or so cycles.

  I ended up creating a 3-phase state machine to handle co-ordinating the
  three modes
	A: playing chunk 1 while copying chunk 3 data to extra buffer
	B: just playing chunk 2
	C: playing from extra buffer while decoding next LZ4 block to 1-2-3

  I track these in one variable, with the states in the high bits,
	$80, $40, $20.  The BIT instruction lets us easily check for these
	and a ROL instruction easily switches between the states.


CHALLENGES:
~~~~~~~~~~~

  The primary problem is decompression also takes a while, longer than
  the 50Hz available (20ms).  It turns out the default LZ4 algorithm from
  qkumba can often take upwards of 700ms, leading to a long pause in
  the playback.

  First Attempt
  =============

  My first attempt to work around this was to load the 3 chunks of data
  as in the naive approach, but in the background copy chunk 3 in RAM,
  and then play from the copied RAM while decompressing the next LZ4 in
  the background.

  This first attempt almost worked, but it tried to split up the LZ4
  decompression into 1/256th chunks to spread across the last chunk being
  played but the LZ4 is too irregular for that.  Some file-chunks decompress
  in irregular ways that don't split up well.

  Second Attempt
  ==============

  One 256-interrupt chunk of data being played takes about 5s and no data
  chunk seems to take more than 1s to decode.  So we can just cheat and
  move the graphics code into the interrupt, and have the decoding happen
  in non-interrupt space.

  This will work for the chiptune player, but it's not going to work well for
  something like a video game where you are truly trying to have the music
  playing unattended in the background (unless your music consists only of
  15s loops).

FITTING ONTO DISK
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Apple II DOS33 filesystem uses 256 byte blocks.  Each file has at least
one 256 byte Track/Sector list file (and takes an additional one for each
28k or so of filesize).

DOS itself reserves the first 3 tracks (12k) and in theory the catalog
reserves an entire track (4k) to hold file info (although you only need
on 256 byte sector per 7 files).

In addition usually you have a "HELLO" BASIC file that runs at boot
which is going to take at least 512 bytes.

So even though the Disk II / DOS3.3 can in theory hold 140k, after
DOS (12k), the Catalog track (4k), HELLO(512 bytes), and our chiptune player
(4k) we have 24.5k of overhead, with 115.5k free (462 blocks).

The layout of our disk packed to the max with KRW files can be seen
in the Figure at the end.  We do manage to fit over 30 minutes of music
on one disk.  It would fit a lot more if we had simple songs that compressed
better rather than the complex chiptune examples I picked.

MEMORY LAYOUT
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As can be seen from the memory map below, if we assume our player can fit in 4k
we have roughly from $2000 to $9600 for memory.  That's $7600 (29.5k).

If we could have single buffered, we could have had 256*3*14 (10.5k) for
decompress and 19k for file size which would let us play most of the 
reasonable sized songs on our play list (KRW(3) in table at end).

For double buffer, then we need 256*2*14*2 (14k) for decompress
and 16k for file size which still works.

VISUALIZATION
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  Originally I had the volume bars and rasterbars in userspace running,
  so it didn't matter how long they took to draw (they'd just get a worse
  frame rate if the interrupts were taking a while).

  But then I had to move the decompression to userspace, and the visualization
  into the interrupt handler.

  Then things got interesting.  The visualization was taking so much time that
  userspace was starved and decompression was not finishing in time, so the
  sound was corrupted and finished early.

  Thus it was time for some cycle analysis.  Here's what I found.

	Approx max 20,000 cycles in an interrupt
	       1,500 used by music decode
	       7,500 used by volume bars
	      16,200 (!) used by raster bars 
	       2,000 for misc rest

	So the problem can be seen here!  That 16,200 for raster bars was
	worst-case, it usually would have been a little less.

  If takes roughly 700,000 cycles to LZ4 decode a block, so even with
  no interrupt can take 35 frames (0.7s) to finish.

  I added a variable TIME_TAKEN ($88) that you can use to find out how
  long the last LZ4 decode took.

  With rasterbars turned off:
	INTRO2: 60@19, 60@36, 62@50 61@1:03 61@1:32 60@2:05 61@2:32

  So roughly $60 (96) frames, or about 2 seconds.

  I went in and optimized the rasterbars code a lot and got it down to
  about 10k cycles worst case (6k probably average case).

  So now it takes $A0 (160) frames, or about 3 seconds.  This seems to
  be workable.


FIGURES/TABLES
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Memory Map
(not to scale)

 ------- $ffff
| ROM/IO|
 ------- $c000
|DOS3.3 |
 -------| $9600
|       |
|       |
|  FREE |
|       |
|       |
|------- $0c00
|GR pg 1|
|------- $0800
|GR pg 0|
 ------- $0400
|       |
 ------- $0200
|stack  | 
 ------- $0100
|zero pg|
 ------- $0000



Sizes
						Disk
		time	ym5	KRW(3)	KRW(2)	Blocks(3)
		~~~~	~~~	~~~~~~	~~~~~~	~~~~~~
KORO.KRW	0:54	?	 2740	 3039	 12	12
FIGHTING.KRW	1:40	?	 3086	 3316	 14	14
CAMOUFLAGE.KRW	1:32	1162	 4054	 4972	 17	17 
DEMO4.KRW	2:05	1393	 4061	 6336	 17	17
SDEMO.KRW	2:12	1635	 5266	 7598	 22	22
CHRISTMAS.KRW	1:32	1751	 4975	 5811	 21	21
SPUTNIK.KRW	2:05	2164	 8422	10779	 34	34
DEATH2.KRW	2:27	2560	 8064	10295	 33	33
CRMOROS.KRW	1:29	2566	 8045	 9565	 33	33
TECHNO.KRW	2:23	2630	 8934	11126	 36	36
WAVE.KRW	2:52	2655	 8368	11318	 34	34
LYRA2.KRW	3:04	2870	 9826	14418	 40	40
INTRO2.KRW	2:59	3217	 9214	 9294	 37	37
ROBOT.KRW	1:26	3448	 7724	 8337	 32	32
UNIVERSE.KRW	1:49	4320	 9990	11225	 41	41
NEURO.KRW	3:47	8681	22376	25168	 89
AXELF.KRW	10:55	9692	47989	54420	189
							----- -----
							423	30:29

Notes: my home-made songs don't have ym5 sizes as I don't have a
working LHA encoder to make a real size.


Interesting bugs that were hard to debug:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

+ Bug in qkumba's LZ4 decoder, only happened when a copy-block size was
	exactly a multiple of 256, in which case it would copy
	an extra time.

+ Bug where the box-drawing was starting at 0 rather than at Y.
	Turns out I was padding the filename buffer with A0 but going
	one too far and it was writing A0 to the first byte of the
	hlin routine, and A0 is a LDY # instruction.

+ Our old friend: forgetting the '#' so we're comparing against some random
	zero page value rather than a constant

+ Related, the accidentally put in a $ when I meant for it to be decimal.
	I was copying to $14 pages instead of 14, overwriting the DOS buffers
	which I didn't notice until I tried to load the next file.