# Crash BASIC 1.42.2 Release Notes

*~written by Crash-tan~*

## THE "FM FINDS ITS GRIT" UPDATE

Custom instruments just learned two tricks that the FM sound chips in
16-bit-era game consoles always had — and that ours was quietly missing.
Until now, building an FM instrument got you a clean, polite tone. Clean is
nice, but it isn't the punchy, metallic growl those old machines were famous
for. That growl comes from two things, and your instruments can now do both.

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## Operator feedback

Real FM chips let an operator feed a little of its own output back into
itself. It sounds like a small thing. It is not. A pure sine, fed back into
its own phase, warps toward a sawtooth — and that warp is the difference
between a soft hum and a gnarly, buzzing bass or lead.

Every layer in an instrument now has a **Feedback** control (and a matching
`feedback` field in the `.cbi`). Leave it at zero and nothing changes —
that's the old clean tone. Dial it up and the operator gets gritty; a touch
(around 1–3) gives a bass or lead that satisfying edge, and higher values
push it into full buzz. It works on any operator, carrier or modulator.

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## FM envelopes — the timbre can move now

The other half of the FM sound is *motion*. On a real chip, a note's
brightness isn't fixed: it bites hard on the attack and mellows as it rings
out. That's the modulator's strength changing over the life of the note —
and before now, ours couldn't change at all. Whatever brightness you set, it
stayed there from keypress to release.

A modulator layer (one pointed at another layer with **FM Target**) now has
an optional **FM Env** — its own attack / decay / sustain / release that
scales how strongly it modulates over time. Switch it on and you can build
the classic electric-piano "ping" that fades to a soft body, a brass note
whose brightness swells in, or a bell whose clang decays as it rings. Your
**FM Depth** still sets the peak; the envelope shapes how it gets there and
falls away.

Both controls are live in the instrument editor, and both round-trip cleanly
to and from your `.cbi` files.

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## Modulators can stack

A smaller addition that opens up a lot: a modulator can now modulate *another*
modulator, not just a carrier. Chaining operators this way is how the more
complex, aggressive FM voices are built — the kind a single modulator can't
reach on its own.

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## Compatibility

Nothing breaks. Every existing instrument plays back exactly as it did —
both new fields are optional, and an instrument that doesn't use them sounds
identical to before. The two controls simply sit at "off" until you reach for
them. Open an older instrument, save it, share it: same sound, every time.
