(I do not recommend watching this demo on a smartphone. It’s quite flashy and exacerbated my headache. Also, the WebMSX code will ask you to go fullscreen, but I don’t think you can start the demo without going fullscreen and then back again.)
In part 1, we constructed a 48 KB ROM to play a tune called “Popsa 2”. We didn’t apply any real compression algorithms but implemented a set of scripts to find repeated sections in a binary file and added an instruction to the .psg file format to “call” repeated sections. Using real compression algorithms we could achieve much better compression, and each tune would just occupy a couple KBs. Using our method, we _just_ manage to fit the tune into a single cartridge. Popsa 2 fit into 48 KB, and the tune we’re going to do today is going to require a 64 KB ROM. If the previous track didn’t quite do it for you, I think it might be worth giving this one a chance. It’s a very complex piece of wonder-inducing music in my opinion. (Press the power button and in the menu that pops up, choose “Power” to boot the ROM.)
64 KB ROMs still require a header at 0x4000 or 0x8000. This means that we need to add a header and some entrypoint code to set up the slots right in the middle of our data. That’s inconvenient, but I didn’t feel like changing the structure of the program, so I just added one check each at the beginning and end of the main loop to see if the HL register has gone above a certain value. If yes: before the main loop, it adds an offset; after the main loop, it subtracts the same offset again. This way, we don’t have to do anything too complex when jumping to a previous section of the track.
Mic – Dreamless is #2 on the top 300 of ZX Spectrum music. There’s a bunch of other nice stuff on that list!
In part 1, I mentioned a problem in WebMSX that prevented the 48 KB ROM from working. 64 KB ROMs are not affected by this problem. The WebMSX player at the top of this article page plays the ROM linked to above. The ROM also works on real hardware (the Hitachi MB-H2 MSX1 I repaired a while ago).
Aside: disabling WebMSX’ auto-scroll
In the unlikely event that you have read this blog’s front page sometime in the last few months, you might have noticed that it scrolled automatically to this WebMSX player, even though this post is now very much not the newest post on this blog! I only noticed this a short while ago and decided to fix it, because it’s quite annoying. The below code snippets are taken from the WebMSX commit with the tag “v6.0.4”. Older or newer versions may look different.
All you need to do is remove the “this.focus()” line in the powerOn function in CanvasDisplay.js:
this.powerOn = function() {
this.setDefaults();
updateLogo();
document.documentElement.classList.add("wmsx-started");
setPageVisibilityHandling();
this.focus(); // <-- this is the line you need to remove or comment out
if (WMSXFullScreenSetup.shouldStartInFullScreen()) {
setFullscreenState(true);
if (FULLSCREEN_MODE !== 2 & isMobileDevice) setEnterFullscreenByAPIOnFirstTouch(); // Not if mode = 2 (Windowed)
}
};If you prefer to just edit the minified version, search for the call to setPageVisibilityHandling() and then edit out the “this.focus(),” bit.
Before:
documentElement.classList.add("wmsx-started"),setPageVisibilityHandling(),this.focus(),WMSXFullScreenSetup.shouldStarAfter:
documentElement.classList.add("wmsx-started"),setPageVisibilityHandling(),WMSXFullScreenSetup.shouldStartInFullScreen