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Hertz Overload

Music-centric demo (demoscene production) [Amiga] · By RETREAM

Backstory Sticky

A topic by RETREAM created May 27, 2024 Views: 191 Replies: 2
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Developer (5 edits)

The music track "Prockressions" was written while fiddling with the RETREAM guitar (shown in the demo itself) after it got fixed and overhauled. It was not made for Hertz Overload, but rather Hertz Overload was made for it.
Thinking of a way to let others enjoy the music brought the idea of making an Amiga production, which immediately suggested the creation of a player capable of a sufficiently high quality. In the past, I had never tried CPU-based audio playback, but a quick experiment showed that it was doable and quite easy. That led to the development of a set of tools that generate and play sound files in custom formats aimed at minimizing the CPU load (later released separately as part of the AQA package). The tools proved that the Amiga can reach remarkably high frequencies (much beyond 70937.9 Hz), which pushed me in another direction: making something more artistic than a player, and that simply meant... a demo!
Hertz Overload was being made for no specific demoparty. When it was almost finished (May 21st, 2024), I checked out which demoparties were about to come and found out that the 68k Inside 2024 was only a few days away! It looked like I could meet the deadline (May 25th) easily, but, of course, on the last day all that could go wrong went wrong, so I could not make all the little changes and additions that I had planned.

Wow I thought the STe had it beat at 50Hz sound, never realised the Amiga could go so high! This was a great tune, I still love the 16-bit demo scene after all these years. Great work!

Developer

Thanks a lot, I'm glad you liked the music!

The Amiga's Paula chip, on its own (i.e. when fetching the data via DMA), can go up to more than 28 kHz when the screen mode is PAL or NTSC; however, on the ECS and AGA chipsets, when the screen mode is (for simplicity) a VGA-like one, Paula can go up to about 57 kHz. On all Amigas, however, Paula can also be fed by the CPU (which is exactly what this demo does), so the ceiling basically becomes the raw CPU power and memory and storage device throughput. My A1200, equipped with a 50 MHz 68030, 60 ns FAST RAM and a CF card, can easily play stuff at 200+ kHz (which is clearly silly).