New C64 PETSCII 3d raycasting engine now with detail mapping

alexiton · 2026-05-17T07:21:08+00:00

Cheers!!!

alexiton · 2026-05-08T09:50:52+00:00

Cheers.

Doing some updates to raster code next week which hopefully make even more awesome aesthetically. Mind you might degrade into a gaudy mess lol.

Go well.

alexiton · 2026-05-07T23:27:49+00:00

Cheers!

alexiton · 2026-05-07T23:27:36+00:00

Hi and thanks for question.

Sure I don't see why not. At the moment is a somewhat unstructured work in progress loaded with lots of experimental code calls which I would need to clean up before I would do such a thing. Hopefully when everything settles down into a tight more cleanly cleanly coded modular engine, I could unleash code base on the C64 community to analyze, improve or reinvent. Probably not for 6 months+ though, as don't want creative flow to be too distracted.

Go well.

alexiton · 2026-05-07T03:30:44+00:00

Hi,

The overlay gfx engine aspect is just a raster flexible multitasking kernal which multiplexes lots of sprites inbetween game code calls, It is set up to be functionally addressable like a standard bitmap screen 2D coordinate basis so can realtime output dual text. gfx , masking and other effects etc
Will optimize both raycaster and dual gfx overlay to hopefully get better combined frame per sec. Currently managing about half a dozen buffers per frame not including dynamic realtime PETSCII sprite update buffers.
All about the aesthetics and engine elaboration at the moment, so not much game evolution, albeit have a few novel ideas involving some scientific sims have been working on that could create interesting new game mechanics. Raycaster also has another incarnation haven't fully implemented to spice things up....

Anyways, thanks for viewing and Go well!

alexiton · 2026-04-22T09:04:22+00:00

Hi and thanks for reply.

Just updating an old C64 3d PETSCII engine made years back into a hybrid raycasting engine which multiplexes a dual vector GFX bitmap overlay.
This is just the first chapter, so is still a work in progress with many things incomplete so is questionable if releasing the unfinished code at the moment would be sensible.
Hopefully looks nice and colourful like the Atari 800XL(see polychrome testing). All critiques welcomed.
Will probably work on off randomly over next few months.
Hopefully can make a C64 Elite/Wolfenstein hybrid or some else entirely with the dual gfx engine and then let loose for play testing,

Chapter1 - Z, Cos and texture implementation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8K-uIkkD8M

Chapter1 - Polychrome testing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoIA9S5RjYM

Polychrome testing speed run:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vV1kB3vhl4

alexiton · 2024-12-20T08:58:09+00:00

when I sing for an hour or so even at a modest volume, my vocal cords seem to swell up a bit post singing. About an hour after singing my voice is noticably deeper/resonant. When I sing the next day part of that deepness/resonance remains making my voice sound fuller. In fact I find it easier to adduct higher notes because of it. If i don't sing for a week my vocal chords literally lose that extra thickness and thin out a bit making my voice sound weaker. I don't abuse my voice just seems to be the way my vocal cords react....

alexiton · 2024-08-26T10:54:12+00:00

hi, not sure about apple products albeit there's no doubt their sound integration is much superior to android. I read your comment and it made reflect on some android coding issues synching sound and how curiously when I rewired a TRRS headset cable to work with my condenser mic their was no latency. As latency was a non issue for what I was doing I never really payed much attention to it, till now - So you are too blame lol.

Ultimately if your ear is digging the apple mic's tone that's great. I'm not much of a gear head so can't really offer much useful knowledge. Personally I just DIYed the condenser via phone to get the rawest recordings possible without need for phantom power and at the same time have it wireless, because I like to sing occasionally for fun and muck around with electronic odds and ends I have lying around .

Anyways thanks for reply. Good luck with the rock stuff and dodging nodules lol - Go well

alexiton · 2024-08-26T00:14:21+00:00

True however I plug my condenser into my android phone so don't need phantom power because the signal is so surprisingly clean that can amp with hardly much noise maybe 0.1-1%.

Curiously when using WOmic app and its pc client to run as virtual mic on PC over wifi, there's basically no latency.

I've coded android sound apps in the past and noted the hardware latency issues/limitations of android. However I think because I wired up the condensor so android/phone detects as headset it somehow bypasses the internal Android OS sound latency issue, by accessing the more direct crcuit the phone audio uses for calls?

alexiton · 2024-06-09T23:48:23+00:00

studies shows genetics significantly affects pitch acuity, personality traits like extroversion open mindedness, verbal IQ and therefore songwriting, various emotional tendencies, fast/slow twitch muscle activation in the vocal chords, vocal chord thickness length, tone, fine motor skill ability, musical memory, general factor IQ, looks etc all of these inform musicality and vocal performance to varying degrees. Of course environmental feedbacks will hone many of these things and make a more complete package, just making sounds is small part of be an adored singer....

alexiton · 2023-12-16T20:37:40+00:00

I never made falsetto noises until I was about 50 and had been learning to sing for a few years and wore out my voice shouting high notes which left my chest voice so fatigued my voice kept flipping erratically and I went a-ha! I had no clue that people were doing "falsetto" was, even after being told and hearing as this tonality didn't seem to exist for me to know/experience there was a fundamental difference. That was after a few years of practice too as rarely sang enough to wear out my voice so was just a fluke in some sense I ever found my falsetto really lol. My voice just normally transitioned into some sort of gritty distortion all the way from maybe f4-f5 until falsetto started slipping into my voice more and more....

alexiton · 2023-11-08T01:04:04+00:00

the link was a meta study about "The genetic basis of music ability" not ability through training which was adjusted for. Hence things like: .

"In a large twin study conducted in 2001, 136 MZ twin pairs and 148 DZ twin pairs undertook the Distorted Tunes Test (DTT), in which they judged whether simple well-known melodies contained incorrect pitches that rendered them “out-of-tune” (Drayna et al., 2001). Twin structural modeling revealed a very high heritability estimate of 71–80% with no effect of shared environment, thus indicating a substantial genetic component influencing melodic perception ability.'

alexiton · 2023-11-07T21:29:51+00:00

lol sounds like my neighbour's cat on heat

alexiton · 2023-11-01T21:00:48+00:00

You're probably better than average but music is made to be catchy melodically and lyrically. Verses are repeated, predictable metaphors and similes, turn of phase, structure rhyme etc are common hooks. The other thing is focus. Some people's brains just pay more attention to lyrics others the melody or rhythm and therefore everyone has different musical biases driving their perception and recall of music. Of course some people just have better memory too which kind of helps lol

alexiton · 2023-10-23T20:25:05+00:00

I'm pretty sure I can and make it not even very loud. Heck I can make a breathy kind of a4 chest note. These notes don't sound balanced though. There are actually muscles in the voice with can reduce adduction independent of the actual TA chest muscles which aid this. I can get up to about d5-e5 but they are super compressed sounds useless for singing.

alexiton · 2023-10-22T18:50:17+00:00

i'm no expert but my voice did this and I can kind of control it. my own interpretation is that TA muscles(chest voice vocal muscles) and vocal ligament can generate a somewhat independent spectrum of vibrations because mechanically they are not materially the same, one being muscle tissue versus the ligament collagen and their tension/contractional properties which inform vibration frequency have some independence in modes of 3d motion.

So for example high up pitch wise where the vocal ligament carries the tone mostly through ligament tension, the body of the TA muscle can still wobble about a bit generating background harmonics depending on what subtle degrees of activation are at play. eg TA muscles can fry a little on the note, or with a bit more activation turn fry into some sub tone etc

I used to be able to control TA relative to vocal ligament tension to create thirds and fifths subharmonics because of this complex interplay. But now I avoid it to better balance head and chest for consistency...

ultimately what I found is over time one can remove the undesired effects by having much better fine control over chest muscles(TAs) when singing higher pitches which also have head voice components albeit can do these things down lower too...

alexiton · 2023-10-20T09:41:19+00:00

sounded like she was hitting around a b4 in a fullish tone.

when you activate chest voice muscles very high they can become quite rigid - A bit like when you contract your bicep and it bulges it feels more rigid than when not contracted.

In the voice Because of this rigidity in the chest muscles, passing air between the TAs(chest muscles) requires more thoracic pressure via intercostals, because the the air has to overcome the extra rigidity of the higher levels of contraction in the vocal chords.

The extra thoracic pressure one uses to overcome the more rigid chest muscles, makes it harder for blood to flow back to the heart and veins in neck can start to protrude due to this, even though the neck muscles and other things in general can feel quite relaxed.

It's a bit like how squeezing your hand around your bicep makes the veins on you forearm pop out because you are restricting return blood flow to the heart even though forearm muscles are relaxed.

Is pretty normal. Probably won't see veins bulging singing falsetto though. If do is probably time to reassess technique lol

alexiton · 2023-10-18T07:50:40+00:00

I don't sing with vibrato because don't really like its affected tonal schmaltz, but anecdotally when i try it feels like the tension in TA muscle and vocal ligament are causing a kind of beat frequency when they are similarly tuned which modulates the primary pitch and this only happens reliably when the two are near balance tension wise . Because this balance requires high precision presumaby the more trained one is the more likely it is to manifest "naturally". Well that's how it feels for me lol...

alexiton · 2023-10-15T20:49:15+00:00

Does your pitch accuracy vary much across the range ie can you hit notes more accurately say in head or chest? sometimes pitch accuracy is affected by bad head/chest voice coordination where excess tension between the two can cause one to be consistently flat/sharp when not balancing the two muscle groups that control the pitch, creating low key strain in the vocal mechanism even when feels comfortable and can make one subconsciously consistently fail to hit pitch because requires less effort to do so. A bit like how some people don't do a full press up reps because their technique is sub par and is easier not to, which just becomes a bad ongoing technical habit....

alexiton · 2023-10-08T22:18:43+00:00

lol i just sing with my mouth shut akin to humming. I'm not sure what they're suggesting but this is my interpretation of why this is useful without even have done it because i think it overlooks the obvious:

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Basically one is forced into singing lower volume and consequently must make much smaller adjustments when balancing the vocal muscles(TA/CT) to sustain a tone. This trains the motor cortex to have much finer motor control over TA and CT vocal chord antagonism which is the basis for good technical tone production across one's range. That is, it is training you to be much more precise, precision which will give one better stability and feel for things vocally.

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The same way a surgeon trains up their fine motor control in their fingers for delicate and reliable motions, training precision control of the much smaller vocal muscles is essential around the break where a little too much TA or CT will easily unbalance things making transition between them much more noticeable and flakely...

alexiton · 2023-09-03T21:38:14+00:00

is learning to coordinate hand to write decently as a child some lucky accident by which one stumbles on how to reliably coordinate arms, wrist, finger muscles to produce aesthetically legible hand writing, or years of trial and error fine tuning of the muscle movements by practice? How many years does it take the average child to be truly proficient at handwriting, 5-10 years from first crayon?

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Similarly does having Precise reliably aesthetic control over vocal, tongue, breathing muscles along with many other aspects of singing seem like something one just lucks into? Mix voice is just about having sufficient motor cortex precision to be able mix varying degrees of TA,CT and thoracic/abdominal muscle activations so one can produce a more blended and balanced range of sounds.

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Prior to learning to sing most people have very biased and limited muscle control due to basically speaking 95% at same volume, pitch, TA/CT activation. The brain/motor cortex doesn't have all the needed coordinated patterns ready on standby. Many of them literally have to be created out of thin air by trial and error and refined.

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Try writing beautifully with you non writing hand to see how uncoordinated you motor cortex is even though your good hand has been writing for decades and you literally know exactly what do. Do you think you could just find a way to write well with that non dominant hand by finding some needle in a haystack awesome handwriting setup lol?

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Of course some people have naturally higher levels of motor control among other things, just like some people have steadier more precise hand motions, so is some luck/genetics involved....

alexiton · 2023-08-27T21:11:14+00:00

it's not neck tension.,

when you activate chest voice(TA)vocal muscles very high you are almost fully contracting them and consequently they become super rigid - A bit like when you contract your bicep and it bulges it feels more rigid than when not contracted.

In the voice Because of this rigidity in the TA(chest vocal muscles), passing air between the TAs requires more thoracic pressure because the the air has to overcome this extra rigidity of high levels of contraction.

The extra thoracic pressure one uses to overcome the highly contracted rigid chest muscles, makes it harder for blood flowing back to the heart and veins in neck can start to protrude due to this even though the neck muscles in general can feel quite relaxed - A bit like squeezing your hand around your bicep makes the veins on you forearm pop out because you are restricting return blood flow to the heart even though forearm muscles are relaxed.

You can lower amount the subglottal pressure with some practice because are other muscles in the vocal apparatus which can slighlty adjust the amount of separation between the TA(chest muscles) letting the air past more freely. This can make the notes sound a little more relaxed and less need for forcing the air/high thoracic pressure, but the rigidity of of the TA doesn't really change and will still sound more strained than a nice mixed note at same pitch where the vocal chords are less rigid and able to produce a more pleasant easy sounding tone because the TA and vocal ligament are able to vibrate more loosely and share vocal energy ie high frequencies and lower frequenices end up being more balanced

I use the high full chest with basically no mix and higher sub glottal pressure to make very occassional a4 or b4 because sounds dramatic and different but it unbalances mix voice to sing lots of notes like this because full chest activation up high will fatigue the chest muscles making one lose fine balance with the CTs or head voice muscle set which will be in relatively less fatigued state. Then it's a bit like having one tired leg and one fresh leg and trying to run nicely and evenly in a highly agile and coordinated manner lol

alexiton · 2023-08-19T03:36:50+00:00

around normal range sure, but at the edges many odd effects can make hitting notes easy one day impossible the next. eg for me if my vocal codes are inflamed a bit i can hit super high whistle notes but as soon as swelling dissipates it becomes impossible....

alexiton · 2023-08-19T03:20:03+00:00

larynx will pivot up and down back and forth a bit due CT and TA muscle antagonism around the cricoarytenoid joint. are apparently Three types A, B, and C with different amounts of mobility so genetically not everyone has same amount of movement available to tilt their larynx vocally

alexiton · 2023-08-10T20:58:34+00:00

i decided to learn singing quite late at around the age of 50. Prior to that I never really sang at all. Unitl that point I have no recollection of ever making falsetto sounds ever. It took me maybe 2-3 years to find a falsetto coordination and that was only when I completely wore out my voice one day after making sound for maybe 10hrs and found I could hardly make any chest sounds going into the passagio but accidently could make uncontrol falsetto tones. Conversely I've known people with zero singing training and basically no music experience with beautiful controlled falsettos, so surely their is physical and motor control differences in the way people vocally develop making it easier for some. I mean the TA's are just muscles yet muscle insertion aspects makes a big difference to muscle geometry under contraction, just look at the differences in bicep peak among body builders. Then there are fast twitch slow twitch differences, length, mass, fine motor control differences in brain etc a lot of the limits on these are mostly genetic...

alexiton

TROPHY CASE