Pro Tracker - Binaries edition

mm, sort of yeah.
1997 was the last time I *released*/did something iirc....

I'm even looking into old sources as we speak, see if there's some hidden treasure to dig up again. well, nothing there except some unfinished game coding (incl gfx, music and other nonsense) I even did a little f-kernel/midas checking and updating last week (in order to get busy on pro-tracker... yup, WBASS environment all over!)

ro, we (edwin+me) did RNFF in about 5 days, and while it could use another 2 days worth o' polishing, it's still possible to make MSX games reasonably fast.. just get cracking! Or .. uhm... are you too n00b? Ah, I just don't think you can do a game in .. 3 months .. Wanna prove me wrong?

I know things can be done very quick (when one has a few days off) I remember the Picture Disk game menus I wrote we're all a weekend work (I wrote a platform, shooter, race and another platform game). Just like the Muzax series, all it took was 20 hours of non stop coding and viola.

But these are other times, I've got a full time job and a family to support.
Together with all other activities it'll be hard to come up with "something" even within a 3month time table. But oh well, I found my self doing a bit of coding again last week and it was fun. I'm even, sssssst, polishing some Oracle stuff. Gheh, can you believe it. Meanwhile there's still this "project" I've been thinking about for the last 10 years: A new updated SEE. The current version (3.x) is a bit lame, it works good but the interface ain't all that. BUT, remember kids, I'm lazy (read: don't have much spare time) so we'll see (as in using yer eyes.. very confusing calling a util "see".. gheh)

so, wolf, let's finish fubsy and let's not forget to do some occasionally

I was making some drums for our games with SEE, yesterday, is it actually possible to wipe a step's contents without erasing a whole row?

Terrible interface

The problem with the Orc interface is that it's made by a coder who thinks in terms of logic, tidyness, hiarchy, feature-overcompleteness.. As far as I'm concerned the Impulse Tracker shortcuts are the most fast 'n optimized ones in the industry, why not adapt them instead?

One of the problem with coders is that they often regard a musical pattern as a 2d table, and start inventing block features based on, for instance, image editing (which is also 2d) or map editing. This is music we're talking about, and music works a slight bit differently compared to normal 2d data. For this reason, a number of 2d block features are not exactly required, while a few others are omitting atm. Also important is the location of certain shortcuts. It's completely irrelevant to have all block keys sorted to a combi key, sure it might look tidy and logical, but what do I care about tidyness in the end? Often used functionality should have a straight hotkey at a VERY convenient place, all the less used stuff may use crappy combinations no-one likes. So, this is what I mean with the that Orc was made by a programmer.

Another idea could be perhaps to completely ditch the whole msx tracking and make a PC tracker controlling an emulator like openMSX (which can accept external input), this way one can support all the PC keyboard keys, make fast editors, have high resolutions, bitmap modes for off-the-grid features that you couldn't just do in screen 0, etc. Only drawback is that sound emulation is far from perfect yet.

block stuff: iirc Orc has all the block functionality combined with [ code ] orso, or [graph] dunno.. this may seem logical but it's not the fastest.. solution.

key config: user config would do, but things could be a bit better than that: in modern PC trackers there's the option for double-press a key while not releasing a combi key. An example: in ST3, IT and ReViSiT one can press ALT-L to quick select the whole channel at cursorX (doesn't matter the cursorY), if you however don't release the ALT key and press another L then you select the whole pattern, then if you press L again you select the channel again, etc.
ALT-K in ST3/IT/ReViSiT interpolates between start/end volume of a block, but the next K (while still holding down the ALT key) wipes all volume info from the block. Same for ALT X and ALT XX (interpolate blocked fx channel and wipe blocked fx channel ) This is far more efficient than wasting extra keys for this extra functionality, esp. since there aren't that many keys at one's disposal.

Also channel muting has some particularies: ALT-F10 solo's a channel, another ALT-F10 on the SAME channel unsolo's a channel, but another ALT-F10 on another channel solos that other channel. These keys are so blazingly fast and efficient I wouldn't ever want to go back to anything else. It's not a matter of getting used to, I'm also used to MBWave, but nothing I've seen is so optimized for speed as the ST3/IT/ReViSiT keys.

So, user key-config could be nice, but then you must support these double functions, and add quite some more methods for added functionality.

No, UU was made in MBWave, our yet to be finished game will be done in IT, using samples of PSG, SCC, and PSG-drums. (in IT you can disable any interpolation in the mixing process which results in the same gritty sound as the scc music we already know!)

The multi-key stuff is quite easy. For each key (az 09 F-keys -=_+,.;'[] etc.) you reserve a byte which remembers the amount of times you pressed such a key. Releasing a combi-key, and pressing a combi-key zeros all these bytes. Then in some key-assign config you simply have a list of methods, a list of (combi)keys and some column in which you give the amount of times a key has been pressed.
Typical methods are:
block whole channel at cursorX, block whole pattern, block start at cursorXY, block end at cursorXY, transpose note in current cell +1, transpose note in current cell -1, transpose block contents +1, transpose blockcontents -1, setcursorstep to 1,setcursorstep to 2, setcursor... ..9, quickselect 16step block at cursorXY (this '16' is usually related to some row highlighter) etc. etc. imagine anything small, anything irrelevant, doesn't matter, there's always some geek who wants to use it.. ;P In case you need help, just beep, I could come up with oodles o' methods.

so imagine this potential Orc screen:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Oracle keybord config          | Know the one 'bout the Belgian Horse? We still don't..     |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
method:                                  combi     key     times    perform if condition = true
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
blockselect whole channel                Gr        L       1        always
blockselect whole pattern                Gr        L       2        always
tranpose note in cell +1                 Gr        Q       1        cursor not in block
tranpose note in cell -1                 Gr        A       1        cursor not in block
tranpose notes in block +1               Gr        Q       1        cursor in block
tranpose notes in block -1               Gr        A       1        cursor in block
solo channel at cursorX                  Gr        Select  1        channel is not muted
unsolo channel at cursorX                Gr        Select  1        channel is muted
interpolate volume in block              Gr        K       1        always
wipe volumes in block                    Gr        K       2        always
halve block contents                     Gr        H       1        always
double block contents                    Gr        G       1        always
copy block contents                      Gr        C       1        always
paste-insert clipboard                   Gr        P       1        always
paste-overwrite clipboard                Gr        O       1        always
goto next pattern                        -         num+    1        always
goto previous pattern                    -         num-    1        always
play song from start                     -         F1      1        always
play pattern from row 0                  -         F2      1        always
play song from cursor                    -         F3      1        always
stop playing                             -         F4      1        always
set cursorY step to 1                    Gr        1       1        always
set cursorY step to 2                    Gr        2       1        always
set cursorY step to 3                    Gr        3       1        always
set cursorY step to 4                    Gr        4       1        always
set cursorY step to 5                    Gr        5       1        always
set cursorY step to 6                    Gr        6       1        always
set cursorY step to 7                    Gr        7       1        always
set cursorY step to 8                    Gr        8       1        always
set cursorY step to 9                    Gr        9       1        always
move cursor to next channel              -         TAB     1        always
move cursor to previous channel          Sh        TAB     1        always
move cursor to next channel              -         Right   1        always
move cursor to previous channel          -         Left    1        always
grab channel-row contents to channelmask -         Enter   1        always
place channelmask                        -         Space   1        always
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The conditions should come from some popup menu when the cursor is on it. The times a key is pressed deserves a little extra detail: If a user sets it to '2' and nowhere any higher than that, then it means the max value for that key-byte is '2', after which is resets to '1' again. If a key-byte isn't higher than 1, then it means that after pressing this key it's automatically reset to 1, in this case it means you can hold it down and the same method will be called at each key-repeat event, like when transposing, block-pasting etc.

Using something like this, the user has the ultimate freedom to tweak things, and I don't even think it's *that* much extra work, ofcoz you want to dynamically re-assemble these keys into the program orso.

Well, this should keep you busy for a while ^_^

Great . Thanks RO for the release

You need a ride ro? You can come along like last year.. Michiel drives again.. So free of charge!

yes I did (sort of, it's a file check routine that take splits drive/path/file (e.g. for use in dos 1) and there's the crux.. )