Trackin', baby!!! Yes, sirree!
I took a break from working
on the tracker and spent some time this week-end working
with the tracker -- that is, I've been tracking a song to test the music player with all channels and effects.
Since I am not a musician, I searched my ancient archives of modules from when I ran an FTP server back in the 1990s (yeah, baby!) and found a suitable XM module that met my special criteria:
- It is in XM format.
- Employs numerous channels.
- Uses samples that could be substituted by synthesized tones.
- Uses a wide variety of effects on more than one track at a time.
And more importantly,
- It is a cool track that I like.
I first whipped up a quick-and-(not-so)-dirty script to export the patterns from the XM track into ASCII text files. I then used the output as the basis for creating patterns for my tracker -- which uses a number of macros to encode the ASCII patterns to my data format.
Of course, there are a few things that I need to adjust by hand since the frequency and amplitude ranges in my platform are different from what XM supports; but overall, it's a pretty easy transformation. I expect to automate this even more in the future, using look-up tables and specialized mapping functions to make the adjustments directly.
Anyway, attached find my first try at re-creating an XM track on the Intellivision Music Tracker 2.0. It is far from complete -- I've only translated a few channels of a couple of patterns. (I also remixed it a bit with a more disco intro.)
The good news is that it all seems to work well, and all effects execute as expected.
I will continue working on this module and using it as my "test-track" as I continue developing my tracker, and will post more progress in the future.
Cheers!
-dZ.