PR8: Advanced

Multi Instrument

PR8 has very unusual design, but I can prove you it's actually pretty cool!

- Set DRM to 01

- Set PHR to 01

- Enable Drum C,D,E

- in Triangle/Drum C; do

LFO-D:02

LFO-W:D0

AMP-H:10

- in Noise/Drum D; do

OSC-C:48

AMP-V:1F

AMP-E:0F

AMP-H:01

- in DCM/Drum E; do

DCM-S:01

- set Automation T1 at the bottom to ESM, so DCM-S is highlighted

- in PHR 01 do notes like this:

C5-- -- -- G4-- -- -- C5-- -- -- G4-- -- --

RT 00-- -- -- 00-- -- -- 00-- -- -- 00-- -- --

T1 01-- -- -- 01-- -- -- 01-- -- -- 01-- -- --

T2 00-- -- -- 00-- -- -- 00-- -- -- 00-- -- --

T3 00-- -- -- 00-- -- -- 00-- -- -- 00-- -- --

When you press play, you should hear Triangle, Noise and sampled kick playing together, and every 2nd kick noise changes into something snare-like

Live Playability

When you press start, your currently viewed pattern will play from beginning to end, and will play it on repeat;

When you switch the pattern, that new one will play after previous one finishes playing, so PR8 queues things up rather than doing sudden change!

There are things that will take effect immediately, like
- changing notes or their parameters in the phrase
(single or all inside phrase when holding B+A),
- tinkering around with active instruments at the bottom of the song, or by soloing/muting rows!

Another possible trick is to copy currently played phrase, switch up the notes or its parameters, and then paste it back!

- Switching instruments/phrases will be queued for the next time PTN plays again!

If you have 2 rows of instruments that utilize same NES channel, then one below will take priority, interrupting the top one - This kind of allows you to have 2 patterns in 1, you activate a variation by muting/unmuting the lower one!

Song Mode

If you don't want to switch patterns every 2 seconds, you can program a sequence into a Song Mode!

Switch to EDIT mode, set up your sequence.. yeah it's not very comfy innit?

I think it's more convenient to go into hex editor and edit values there!

When you switch on the Song Mode, it's gonna queue the song right as the pattern finishes, just like everytime you switch the pattern

when you turn it off, it's gonna queue currently viewed pattern

If you turn it on straight away, it's gonna CONTINUE the song that was playing, from that last point!

If you change the SNG value, then it's gonna reset the song back to very start!

There's also a shortcut that lets you start playback from the loop segment you specified: do A+START in SONG mode area (excluding the SNG value, because that’s gonna restart the song when you let go of A)

Your own DPCM samples

If you fancy something else and/or more than already provided DPCM samples, you can add more through commandline tool provided!

For me tool worked fine enough, but when you put too many samples, it doesn't error, so keep that in mind if your rom doesn't start or something!

Secret sauce: DPCM bass

some of my songs feature kind of overwhelming bass, it's coming from DPCM channel, and I achieve it through looping very short parts of various samples - any sample is a bass sample if looped tight enough!

Visual mods

Some of my ROMs have not only different samples, but also different screens, sometimes it's to differenciate different ROMs from one another. but for some it was just play-around that stayed to this day - nothing like a swearword instead of dignified "DCM" over your DCM instrument values innit?

## Changing the tiles on the screen

Screen is 30x32 (height x width), each block being made of 8x8 pixels

First block on the screen, the top-left corner is located at 14B45h - FF being the black block.

at 14B98h I changed those FC values to 4C 48 42 51 4E 4C 54 52 48 42 so it says "MICROMUSIC" at the very top

That vertical "INFU" I got on the right side is 4 different values in 4 different places:

14D83 - 48 (I)

14DA3 - 4D (N)

14DC3 - 45 (F)

14DE3 - 54 (U)

Where do we even get which values we can use for which tiles?

if you're using Mesen, go into "Debug→Tile Viewer" and hover your mouse over a tile you want to use, and first 256(FF) tiles should be usable for you!

Very last block displayed on the screen is located at 14F04, it's the last D1 value, which is the tile for lower-part of the silver bars

## More modding(?)

I always wished to know how to change colors of things, but unfortunately I never got to it - For some of my vids that display green, red, blue or black/purple PR8 screen I used Nestopia's palette changer, so swapping the very basic colors used by NES... I wish I knew how to change it inside PR8

Bugs and problems

• (Old versions only): Every note is shifted by 1 semitone up (so C-4 is actually C#4 etc etc), but this can be fixed by changing OSC-C parameter to FF

• You can accidentally mute/unmute channels when performing specific actions one after another very quickly (holding B to move between sections of the screen, then pressing select and letting go of the button)

• Everything you edit/create/delete is PERMAMENT - Make backups, maybe/maybe not savestates, and be mindful not to edit instrument/phrase that you forgot you used it before and it messed up your previous song!

Would I recommend PR8?

Since I made save-copying tool, multiple songs, ways to overcome limitations, I totally would recommend PR8!

At least for it's different approach to making Chiptune, for it's built-in echo... Certainly it tickled my brain in a different way than any other music making software I used!