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Music Production => MilkyTracker => Tracking => MilkyTracker Support => Topic started by: stefix on March 19, 2010, 01:05:27

Title: Old notebook vs Milky Tracker
Post by: stefix on March 19, 2010, 01:05:27
Hi all

I'm going to run Milky Tracker on  old notebook with pentium 166MHz Cpu and 16MB of RAM memory, windows 98 os. Is this possible ? Will Milky Tracker work fine on this "machine" ? ;D

Ps. Sorry for poor english   :P
Title: Re: Old notebook vs Milky Tracker
Post by: Saga Musix on March 19, 2010, 09:17:21
Why don't you try yourself? Ofcourse, you could lend me your machine for a couple of days and I'll try it out for you, but that seems rather complicated to me.
When I started with tracking, I used ModPlug Tracker on a P1-133 with 24MB of RAM, so it's very well possible that MilkyTracker will also run on such a machine, however you might have to disable some features (f.e. follow cursor mode, you might not be able to create tunes with more than 16 or so voices...)
Title: Re: Old notebook vs Milky Tracker
Post by: stefix on March 19, 2010, 11:16:06
Thanks for replay.

I don't have this notebook yet. I asked becouse in my win XP x64 Milky Tracker process takes ~18MB of ram. 
Title: Re: Old notebook vs Milky Tracker
Post by: raina on March 19, 2010, 12:15:23
If you grab an older version compiled for Windows 9x, it will most likely run. But it'll be slow. Whether it'll be responsive enough for you to work with is your call. I imagine you'll be needing a large buffer size for smooth playback, and personally I know I couldn't work with it being used to the real-time nature of Fasttracker II and the low-latency ASIO driver in MilkyTracker and Renoise.

If Milky is too sluggish (being optimized for portability rather than speed), there's still hope. You said your OS is going to be Windows 98. That means you'll be able to run DOS programs. Why not give the original Fasttracker II a go? The sound chip (there IS one, right?) in that laptop will probably be SoundBlaster Pro compatible, with which you'll be able to get 44100kHz/mono or 22050kHz/stereo out of Fasttracker II and even then it should run mighty fine.

You shouldn't worry about RAM usage unless it really becomes a problem. Both XP and 98 use virtual memory to run more programs than would seem possible by simply looking at the numbers. With 98 you also have the option of booting to plain DOS (MilkyTracker doesn't benefit from this), but I'd rather not go in-depth about optimizing that environment unless need be.
Title: Re: Old notebook vs Milky Tracker
Post by: stefix on March 19, 2010, 13:05:34
Thanks for your answers.

It's great idea to run real FastTracker II in DOS mode, I even haven't think about this simple solution  :) I just want to make some 4ch, oldschool chip-sounding tracks then I think FT2 (or IT) will be optimal way for me.

Title: Re: Old notebook vs Milky Tracker
Post by: Khades on March 21, 2010, 20:00:54
i'd install smthin like Linux from scratch with directfb and swap partition and some memory optimisations for makin milky work on your cpu.

anyway dunno will it work
Title: Re: Old notebook vs Milky Tracker
Post by: Saga Musix on March 21, 2010, 22:59:02
Win95/98 might perform a lot better. So yeah, it will most likely not work.
Title: Re: Old notebook vs Milky Tracker
Post by: stefix on March 21, 2010, 23:55:45
Situation under control - I found a better notebook (PIII 500Mhz, 128 MB RAM, win98se OS). FT2 and Milky works without problem. Now I can connect it thru the mixer to another computer with Ableton etc.  to ennoble the signal using plugs for mastering.

I wonder why some modules are a bit too loud as can be seen on the peak level (in Milky).
Is this incompatibility issue between the trackers?
Title: Re: Old notebook vs Milky Tracker
Post by: Saga Musix on March 22, 2010, 00:42:01
Well, the depends on the module type you're loading. The XM format doesn't have a master volume, wheres f.e. IT and S3M have such thing and hence, such tunes might clip in Milky. Decreasing the global master volume might help, but I wouldn't play IT/S3M files in Milky anyway...