OK, first I must see it, then I will talk

So on the MSX trackers have always used a text mode rather than bitmap, okay. On the cpc with the same speed processor and seemingly slower writing to vram (there are no text modes) all the many trackers were considered fast enough. If the user wants to resize or move the screen about during playing/editing then symbos will do its job, and the music would continue under interrupt, and the user would gain control back once the symbos had updated the screen.
SymAmp already plays music on the symbos desktop with a perhaps small but constantly changing graphic display. But then again, i've seen the video where symamp has happily played, while watching a video and playing minesweeper. Not saying its easy but I'm far from convinced its impossible, and if it was nearly impossible that the sort of challenge people like to take on

what res @ cpc?
how many music-channels @ cpc?
how big a canvas for the patterndisplay do the cpc trackers use?

Screen 0 at 80-columns is like 512x212 mode, and MBWave for example has about 12 channels (out of 24) on screen at the same time + 24 output analysers. Furthermore, almost the whole screen is filled with this patterndisplay.

Grab an MSX(emu), leech MBWave, leech some example-tune, load/play and toy around with it.. then tell me if exactly *that* performance is possible in sc7, with no compromises compared to screen 0!

And actually, a bitmap music program on MSX is Synthsaurus.. famous only for its images of dinasaurs and overall slick layout.. and that was it actually. Now, it wasn't really a tracker, it was a score-editor in fact. Graphsaurus was far more popular.. together with AGE, they're "the" two drawing programs for MSX, as used in the scene at least..

Great to see this heavy activity here! Currently I am in the office in Russia, but I have time for SymbOS, too.
The actual status is, that I am still fighting with a strange bug, which appeared after implemented a bigger sector cache. As Trebmint figured out, that SymbOS is quite slow when reading many small pieces from a file I had to do this improvement.

Regarding a sound tracker for SymbOS: It would be an interesting project because of the cross-platform and GUI/multiprogramming environment. If course it will not be possible to update the pattern display at any time when the song is playing. I had some experiences with trackers in the past on CPC and PC.

Other nice applications would be:
- Solitair
- HTML-Browser
- Excel
etc...

Quote:

Yes the thread must never die!!! Perhaps there should be a SymDev'06 competition?

Without the work of prodatron SymbOS destiny is to be only a (forgotten) dream

Quote:

I had some experiences with trackers in the past on CPC and PC

Your Digitracker seems a very powerful example of tracker. I've played a bit with it lately and I like it a lot

it would be different if -on msx- one could go to some true 'dosbox' and run a scr-0 tracker there.. but that defeats the whole use of symbos ofcourse In that case symbos won't be more than a sophisticated Ease..

The cpc uses a AY3-8910 so you can take your assumptions from that. However as I said before a tracker should be aimed at games and demos, not producing a no1 hit.

I have no doubt that MBwave or whatever pushes music to it limits on the MSX, but in truth it's a niche product designed for rare hardware on an obsolete machine. Okay some people use it but not many.

I guess you can look at symbos in a number of ways. First it could just be seen as a nice demo of what can be achieved on an 8bit. Second you can see it as extending the life and interest in a machine. And with 20000 views and 600 posts in a few months there has to be something that msx users see in symbos.

Would a tracker running under symbos that caters for all msx's/cpc's/sam coupes/enterprises be a bad thing? Okay it wouldn't have 128 channels, or perhaps be as professional as MBWave.

No-one uses MBWave for a no1 hit, ppl use it (apart from ad-hoc tunes) for demos and games. And to label it 'professional' would be too much credit I think. For AY-music symbos would be well enough. But even then, sound extensions like Fm-pac or/*and* Music Module are popular, not rare, *and* used for demos and games. These also have up to 9 channels, 10 in case of the music module's ADPCM channel, and perhaps another channel (like MB classic) for a command track. And in case of Fm-Pac and PSG (a common Mircocabin setup) up to 12 channels can be used excluding a command track! So the MBWave thing was merely an example of interface, rather than an example of sound. So, in the end, it looks as if the only tracker that could be made would be an AY tracker.. with which there's nothing wrong. But I doubt I'll ever see a tracker for fmpac, musmod or moonsound.. (unless the viewport/amount of cells is kept small, so only a few fields need to be updated, but I don't think ppl are going to like that!)

20000/600, those're mainly numbers boosted by programmers who find it all very interesting to follow, nothing shocking on that. Now that it's getting more to completion, discussions on what to do with it, e.g. what kinda apps to make, is to be taken as a serious discussion! And there is really a difference between screen 0 and screen 6. On screen 0 every application can be made and operated at full speed.. the only design-barrier is: "can you make an application using (modified) ascii characters?" If yes, you'll end up with a fast program in which you can change the whole screen at once when required. That *does* differ from screen 6 where you obviously can't change the whole screen at once and need to think about apps where the whole screen doesn't need to change at once. It's just that typical MSX trackers are so very much in the first category. So, any other example, a database, a spreadsheet, all very doable in symbos no doubt. Btw, I dunno about a notepad clone, is there any in symbos? So, not page-per-page, but scrolling per line of text. It's kinda the same issue.. whole screen-update at once..

Actually, a nice PSG tracker wouldn't be a bad thing at all! As far as I know there is no decent MSX tracker for the PSG, and with all the MSX1 action going on in MSXdev I would bet some people were wishing there was such a thing already! For something like MSXdev you'd want a seperate replayer of course, but it shouldn't be hard to convert whatever replayer someone comes up with to also work properly outside of SymbOS. Regarding speed, Screen6 should probably be fast enough for a PSG tracker. When using a Moonsound things become a tad hard because you need to update almost the entire screen due to the amount of channels, but for a PSG tracker you'd prolly only need to print a few columns worth of data. Personally I'm also looking forward to making some kind of app for SymbOS, tho I have yet to think of something... Ah well, if I can't come up with anything I'll just make Solitaire, it seems to be the most-used Windows application anyhow!

@wolf: updating the whole screen is slow, sure, but you're making it sound like you could get a cup of coffee while it's doing it. If you were to update the entire screen (something that won't happen a lot, if at all) you're talking about something in the order of a fifth of a second. While that's a very long time in computer terms, it's hardly something that should keep you from using a program. Heck, even on my 3GHz Celeron I can clearly see Windoze redraw the screen when there's a lot of stuff going on. It's a tad, uhm, strange to expect your 3MHz MSX to be faster...

1/5 second delays for navigating is terror

What I guess I was trying to say is that what I find most important about symbos now it is cross platform, is that it stay that way. Simply put without trying to p$%$ off too many people that apps should run on all the supported platforms even if that means they are putting limits on the msx which don't normally exist. That's not to say that this has to always be the case but why cater for the minority (even though it may be a majority of msx'ers). Lets cover all the basics first before we start to get back to coding for more specialised machine specific hardware.

From a symbos point of view I'd prefer people tend to think more along the lines of 2,4,16, 256 colour mode rather than mode 0 or mode 6.

And yes a PSG tracker is what I was thinking about all along. As Prodatron knows one of my aims of being involved in symbos is to ultimately produce games, and perhaps you'll all think I'm stupid even thinking that cross platform gaming is even possible on 8bit. A tracker is just part of that process.

In any case, my initial point was a reaction on jltursan at page 42, who didn't really specify a chip, but I assumed (by his referring to MIDI) that he was aiming at a typical tracker like other MSX trackers, e.g. with a large canvas for cell-display. A small-display PSG tracker would prolly be no problem for symbos.

Let's say that msx trackers look nothing like this:

Instead, MSX-trackers look very open and empty..

it's just that there's such a large difference between msx-trackers and cpc-trackers.. it might take a while to get used to that being an MSX'er. (if ever! tracker-users are known to be extreme nitpickers.. just see the FT2 vs ST3||IT2 wars on PC )

(note that realfun isn't officially ready/released afaik, I couldn't find any mbwave/fst screenshot, and msd suggested this one)

(edit) ah, and here's Meridian:


layout-wise MB(wave) and FST are roughly like Meridian.. as you see we're kinda used to empty'ish open'ish interfaces..