Battle of the Bits

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Huby View Raw Firki

::|CONTENTS

Specifications
How To Start Abusing Huby
Tools of the Trade
Possible Inspirations For You
See Also

Huby is an extre-e-e-e-e-emely minimalistic zxbeep (format) engine by Shiru, in terms of that the engine itself doesn't occupy more than quarter kilobyte! The songs, obviously, occupy more, but they still don't go overboard, making a two-minute song slightly bigger than just 1KB!

Speaking of, the current version on Huby is just 99 bytes big! :o

Also, it is the only engine to be supported in three Windows utilities at once (two of which are also multiplatform): 1tracker, any .xm tracker of your preference and, more recently, Beepola! Too bad the said support kind of sucks.

Specifications

When you equip yourself with Huby, you're controlling two channels of pure fuzz and one channel with a totally lone drum sample. ,_,

No effects are supported, so you're probably gonna mach one to achieve proper arpeggios. And even if you're going for the tempo abuse, be cautious of that there is no tempo effect you can put mid-song either! Well, okay, the only effect you can play around with is the finetune, but we'll talk about it later on.

There is no note stop feature available; instead, the note stops itself after going to the next line in a pattern! o_O Therefore, consider yourself flooding the song with bleeps and bloops where needed!

How To Start Abusing Huby

Well, first off, you're gonna decide which tracker you're gonna use. Each has its' pros and cons, but Beepola is definitely not recommended as for now, because.

Beepola
^.^ :: It's on the easiest zxbeep tracker you can get along with; is able to split the song to patterns for smaller size; .tap export.
x_X :: Absolutely no drum support; Windows-only unless you emulate it.

.xm trackers
^.^ :: The "complete" effect set; being possible to split the song to patterns for smaller size; source file can be written on any platform that has MilkyTracker or anything like it.
x_X :: The converter works only on Windows as for now; you know you went out of note range only when you convert the track; you have to fiddle around to get some .tap exports.

1tracker
^.^ :: Truly multiplatform; possibility to fix tracks just by opening these in Notepad; .tap export.
x_X :: Kinda clunky to get along with; no optimization is given to the resulting tracks since the track is actually a one huge pattern, no finetune effect.

If you go for the second approach, click here
to download the whole toolchain.

Tools of the Trade

What was that "complete" effect set we were talking about? Well, if you're trying to write a song on the .xm tracker, you'll get an extra feature not available in either beeper-based trackers - finetune! This can be achieved by using the E5X effect, with 8 instead of "X" as a base, any numbers below 7 for higher frequency and any about 9 (up to F) for lower frequency.

Oh, and place your one and only drum sample wisely. You've got only one of these after all, y'know.

Possible Inspirations For You

It's a relatively new beeper engine, but it has the sound aesthetics of Nether Earth and, more precisely, Robin of the Wood, so you might want to check out their title screen themes (and game over theme of the latter).

Olso, check the below out:
* fod is going to have nightmares of skinnyhead by Slimeball

See Also