iamdan
iamdan on Hacker News
Posted by
iamdan on Friday February 06, 2026 @05:23PM
from the show-hn dept.
https://chiptunes.netlify.app
I built a browser-based tracker app that let's you compose audio across 4 channels. Inspired by the Gameboy audio system - not quite a true recreation but a fun toy nonetheless. Song data is persisted in local storage so you don't lose your progress.https://github.com/daniel-black/chiptune-tracker
That's sweet! I'm trying to see how far I can push the web audio api but yeah the aliasing can be harsh. I think there are also some things I can do with filter nodes to smooth things out a bit
I had a bug in my demo code around handling the duty cycle change, this should be fixed now
This should hopefully be fixed now, there was an issue with handling the radio button selection change.
I haven't been able to find anything about why exactly they chose to provide both 25% and 75% DCs - they do sound the same minus the inverted polarity like you mentioned.
This is correct, the demo not properly handling the selection of a new duty cycle. I pushed up a correction just now. Thanks for laying out a detailed replication - made for an easy fix
Great name. That's super cool i like the retro aesthetic. The scheduling piece of trackers built with the Web Audio API is definitely a bit of a struggle but so far it's been manageable
Yes! My dad has an old Commodore 64 and I vaguely remember a skiing game. I think it's so cool what folks were able to accomplish musically on such limited systems at the time
Thank you for calling that out, I am aware that the audio demos are a little busted right now and I'll be patching them up when I get a little time
it does, you definitely "feel" the change. I actually have to do some digging to figure that out, I unfortunately do not have my childhood GBA anymore so I have to rely on audio clips to make that call
This is the nice thing about constraining myself to a rather old and crude sound style, the rough edges can remain a little rough
That's true, I'm coming into the audio and signals world as a beginner so I'm still picking up the lingo but totally! For my purposes I only want to keep track of a single source for a channel so I've gone down this wave transformation path rather than composition but that also would get the job done
It's super cool! Just from short time that I've been playing around with it, it looks like you can push it pretty far. Before too long I hope to have a Show HN post with a link to the tracker out live in production
I think long term I will be moving in that direction. For this initial exploration and experimentation I've been doing with the Web Audio API, the sawtooth oscillator + step function waveshaper node have been sufficient for my use case but I will need investigate whether I can produce a more authentic sound with an AudioWorkletProcessor approach
Posted by
iamdan on Monday April 07, 2025 @12:23PM
from the danblack.co dept.
that's sweet, love dracula theme
Posted by
iamdan on Monday March 03, 2025 @10:30AM
from the show-hn dept.
https://www.pdfdark.com/
I wanted a way to read PDFs at night and not burn my retinas out so I whipped together this super simple website with Claude to solve my problem.It uses Mozilla's pdf.js library to load and render a PDF and then inverts the colors with CSS. It has basic controls like zoom in, zoom out, reset zoom, previous and next page. There are some keyboard shortcuts that you can find by toggling the "q" key.
Hmm I am sorry to hear that. Were you trying to refactor with gpt-4 or gpt-3.5-turbo?
Posted by
iamdan on Wednesday October 18, 2023 @09:52AM
from the show-hn dept.
https://userefactory.com
I found myself copying code snippets into ChatGPT all too often so I built a tool to make refactoring code easier.You will need to bring your own OpenAI API key to use the tool.I'd love any and all feedback about how I can improve the app. Thanks!Also, this is open source - the code can be found at: https://github.com/daniel-black/refactory
Posted by
iamdan on Friday July 22, 2022 @04:03PM
from the show-hn dept.
https://www.hacolyte.com/
Long time Hacker News lurker, first time Hacker News poster : )I built a Hacker News reader app with NextJS and TailwindCSS that pulls item and user data from the hacker news api (https://github.com/HackerNews/API).This is my first time really building and launching something for users so I'd love any and all feedback. The roughest spots at the moment are the threading of comments and the...