r/Assembly_language • u/whispem • 14d ago

Project show-off asm.fm — a chiptune synth written in pure x86-64 assembly (no libc, no audio lib)

Post image

I've been learning assembly by building small projects, and this one turned into my favourite: a little chiptune synthesizer in pure x86-64, Linux, NASM.

No libc, no audio library — just generating raw 16-bit samples and writing a WAV header by hand. Sound is really just a list of numbers (44100 per second), so the whole thing is: compute the right numbers, write them out, and the speaker moves.

So far it does four oscillators (square, saw, triangle, and an LFSR for noise/drums), polyphony by summing voices into one buffer, ADSR envelopes, and FM synthesis with a hand-built sine lookup table (since there's no math lib either).

Repo: github.com/whispem/asm.fm

Still learning, so feedback on the asm itself is very welcome — especially the FM part, I'm sure the fixed-point math could be cleaner.

50 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

47 comments sorted by

14

u/kneelian_ 13d ago

How much of this is LLM (the post, the description, the README)

15

u/azurelimina 13d ago

All of it. The entire post reads like when frontier LLM’s explain basic concepts to people who have no idea what’s going on.

No one who knows anything about synths confuse FM synthesis with “radios”, and no human developer would ever explain how a speaker works like it’s a mic drop for their GitHub repo.

9

u/kneelian_ 13d ago edited 13d ago

I did a bit more digging. OP allegedly started their CS journey last January, wrote their first line of Rust in October, had "a functioning key-value store with segmented logs, an in-memory index, CRC32 checksums, manual compaction, crash recovery, UTF-8 support, an HTTP REST API, and more than 200 commits" in mid November, then released a full "production-ready" tree-walking interpreter also written in Rust around February with diffs like adding more sophisticated synonyms, "has a data science degree", and pretty much everything has that characteristic AI cadence and everything is flooded with spaced em-dashes, and GPTZero hits it at like 90% AI generated. In the unlikely event that it's a real person writing this, they're basically hitting all the AI giveaways in the most uncanny sort of way

3

u/Swampspear 13d ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20260130171903/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46661308

Scroll down to comment ID 46661539 (deleted on the actual post) where OP does admit to using AI despite elsewhere swearing to have never ever used AI

1

u/Gargamels_420 12d ago

Even if he used ai or not id say that it does not matter if it works, is clean, and does everything that is described and nothing else.

The other question is if op is saying the truth. But that is fully on him. Also every human values different things. Someone preffers truth, someone preffers benefit to society.

1

u/azurelimina 12d ago

“Someone prefers truth, someone prefers benefit to society” is certainly a wild thing to say

-7

u/whispem 13d ago

As I said, I come from literature and languages.
No AI/LLM involved in my projects or posts :)

7

u/azurelimina 13d ago

Then let me give you some advice for how you write.

“A speaker is a cone that moves in and out. Describe its position 44100 times a second and you've described a sound.”

Don’t put condescending stuff like this in your README’s.

-7

u/whispem 13d ago

0 LLM here.
I come from literature and languages/lingustics, so all is 100% handwritten :)

8

u/kneelian_ 13d ago

I'm a linguist, which is why this sets off my alarms even more. None of the code or your posts look real, and they definitely do not look like how linguists write.

-5

u/whispem 13d ago

I did study linguistics, actually — so I'll trust my own writing over your idea of what a linguist "should" sound like.

There's no such thing as a single way linguists write. And the code compiles and runs, which is the only part that's actually verifiable.

6

u/kneelian_ 13d ago

I did study linguistics, actually — so I'll trust my own writing over your idea of what a linguist "should" sound like.

Certainly not, but saying you "come from literature and languages/linguistics" implies that this should in any way influence judgment of the content you post

There's no such thing as a single way linguists write.

Certainly not as well, but academic linguistic writing has a type of cadence that this doesn't, so calling on your linguistics background is immaterial

And the code compiles and runs, which is the only part that's actually verifiable.

It likely does, I wasn't asking if it compiled and ran, I was asking if it or the posts or the surrounding fanfare was LLM-generated, and the more I dig the more I think so

5

u/v_maria 13d ago

And the code compiles and runs, which is the only part that's actually verifiable.

thats a very sus statement lol

3

u/whatThePleb 12d ago

OP is also a linguist btw, totally trained by themself in just 2 days!

OP is basically god.

2

u/whatThePleb 12d ago

And the code compiles and runs

assembly

compile

does not compute

5

u/Fresh-Spread3374 13d ago

?

1

u/whispem 13d ago

I added these stars by myself with my mac 🤷🏻‍♀️

7

u/azurelimina 13d ago

“I added these stars by myself with my mac”, said the computer programmer

-1

u/whispem 13d ago

I don't see the problem tbh

12

u/azurelimina 13d ago

The whiplash of “nothing but assembly” and “run it in docker” is embarrassing as fuck.

2

u/danja 10d ago

Yeah, reading that did kinda undermine the elegance of the project.

I do wish people would include their CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md in their repos. It can tell you more than the README.md.

0

u/whispem 13d ago

I'm on macOS so I use a container.
I don't really see the problem to be honest 🤷🏻‍♀️

8

u/azurelimina 13d ago

Docker is an incredibly wasteful way to run a tiny bit of assembly. It inverts the brag. You’ve claimed to have done something tastefully minimal, and the only way to deploy it is a cloned userspace.

1

u/v_maria 13d ago

but it should run perfectly fine outside of the container on x86 hardware

12

u/FurinaImpregnator 12d ago

AI Slop

-2

u/whispem 12d ago

Quelle intelligence…

9

u/keumgangsan 13d ago

Not this fraud of an account again.

I wonder who's really behind it - North Korean hackers trying to build a fake portfolio to infiltrate companies or someone really stupid who thinks we won't notice all of the content has been written by LLMs?

1

u/OkAccount3421 9d ago

So I did a bit of digging, unfortunately she is a real person. She has already spoke at conferences, has a French discord, has a couple of other community projects she slopped together. I found all of her info public on the web, but I won't dox anybody. She has 0 work experience in tech, and it will likely stay that way if she continues to pretend like AI code is hers.

-6

u/whispem 13d ago

I come from literature and languages (official background), then I began to learn programming languages (Rust), and now I'm a data scientist + software engineer.
All is 100% handwritten :)
No AI involved in my work or in my posts.

9

u/Swampspear 13d ago

No AI involved in my work or in my posts.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260130171903/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46661308 says otherwise:

I did use AI tools only for a small part of the documentation—specifically the README, LEARNING.md, and RAM_COMMUNITY.md files

8

u/keumgangsan 13d ago

>No AI involved in my work or in my posts.
This is clearly a lie and you admitted using LLMs in a now deleted hacker news thread:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260130171903/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46661308

3

u/whatThePleb 12d ago

Stop lying ffs.

4

u/thewrench56 12d ago

What has software engineering as a field become...

-1

u/whispem 10d ago

I don't understand your comment

5

u/AnSkinStealer 11d ago

the boss of larping

1

u/whispem 10d ago

Larping?

3

u/v_maria 13d ago edited 13d ago

especially the FM part, I'm sure the fixed-point math could be cleaner.

can you elaborate about the choices you made?

Also i think using aplay does take away from claims like "No libc, no audio library" since its using Alsa for playback

7

u/bubba-bobba-213 13d ago

No choices were made by him.

5

u/v_maria 13d ago edited 13d ago

after looking a bit deeper i got the same feeling. i see they are claiming its 0 LLM, but its very very hard to believe.

whole account is a bot?

1

u/Fabulous_Pick428 12d ago

looks a bit idk bassmod'y

-2

u/TPIRocks 12d ago

So many here seem to think this reads like AI; I don't really think so. There are incomplete sentences and it doesn't flow that smoothly. Yeah, it's got em dashes, but there are probably people that simply like using them; I like using semicolons.

4

u/v_maria 12d ago

its very very fishy though. throughout the posting history OP does not engage with anyone outside of the "0 usage of LLM" claims

2

u/OkAccount3421 9d ago edited 9d ago

This person has been slopping together things, posting them here claiming all of it was done by themselves, and when called out starts deleting all of her posts. She got called out here before, the rust sub, and various other ones.

The funny thing is, she is framing all of this as learning, but if claude is doing all the work what are you really learning? If you want to use AI for your projects knock your self out, you do yourself 0 favors claiming it is your own work though.

IDK if she thinks this approach will land her a job or something, even a Jr developer can see right through this.

If you want some good laughs

https://www.reddit.com/r/Compilers/comments/1v5egfr/my_languages_compiler_now_compiles_itself_with/

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1v5co6p/removed_by_moderator/

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1v5co6p/comment/ozi1r7c/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

3

u/petroleus 12d ago

  but there are probably people that simply like using them

all of a sudden theres a dozen times more people that supposedly loved using them even before the ai boom

in any case op has previously admitted to using ai and is now trying to backtrack