It is true that MoonBlaster is way not the ideal tracker.
However, imho, there is nothing wrong about tracker-based programs itself
(and btw, FST Pro was -for its time- really a cool program. It was one of
the first good music-programs, with MusicModule support!).
In my opinion, the three big disadvantages of MBWAVE are:
- It can't take multiple 'commands' per step, for example a note (C 3) and a
volume change at the same time. Oracle didn't handle this very well, because
it still allowed only two commands at the same time.
- It can't use the FM part of the MoonSound as well as the Wave-part (MBFM
can but it can only handle 6 Wave-channels and the version is also very
old). This is VERY stupid because FM-sounds are really small but at the same
time can sound very awesome and can handle additional effects, like the
'X'-effect MBFM or MB1.4 have.
- It has a bad songfile (user-mode) format.
Koustracker was a really good tracker, except for that editing was a crime.
But the idea was good.
A good tracker would -imho- feature:
- Multiple commands per step like Koustracker.
- 18 2-op/4-op FM channels and 24 wave-channels.
- Use the MoonSound interrupt for timing. Only. Not something difficult with
two timers (a base timing and a step timing) like MBWAVE currently has.
- Good importing of old tracker files, _including_ MB1.4 wavekits. Simple
ADPCM to PCM decoding, the code is already there (use XADPCM).
- Good user-mode format. The edit-mode format could be something near to a
memory-dump of the tracker's RAM. If it takes much disk- or RAM-space, who
cares. It's for editing. The user-format however should be optimized to do
the following:
* Use length-bytes to indicate the distance between two notes (like
Koustracker did). This makes the files small and is easy to implement in the
replayer. It is also fast.
* Only save the used channels. The other ones should be skipped, even not be
'scanned' while replaying.
* Have the songname, composer, and wavekit names in it.
~Grauw
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visit my homepage at http://grauw.blehq.org/
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