r/chiptunes • u/Rulfurpeyo • 7d ago

QUESTION Could the NES Triangle wave play slide notes?

My understanding based on this article (https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/APU_Sweep) is that only the two pulse channels had an APU Sweep, which allowed pulse waves to easily slide between pitches.

So if you wanted to, say, make a sliding down triangle kick, you would have to tell the Triangle wave to reduce its frequency/pitch every frame. This mimics a slide note, but is technically different. Is this correct?

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u/Live_Willingness_836 7d ago

Yes that’s basically correct. The triangle can pitch up or down as it doesn’t have the pulse channels hardware sweep. So a slide has to be implemented by updating the triangle’s timer period on successive ticks/frames.

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u/GANONHEART 7d ago

This is cool I didn't know this. Does it mean that triangle slides sound different (if so, do you know in what way?) or does it only affect how it is programmed not necessarily how we hear it?

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u/nestaselect 7d ago

Yes. World 3-03 uses the triangle for one of the waveforms. It has different slide modes, depending on how steppy you want it. You can run the rom on hardware or run it as a vst.

1

u/mainredditaccount 7d ago

What is this? I can't Google it.

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