The issue has always been the supporting tools around it.
This. This is literally why I said "f*ck it" so many years ago, and we went with something that would be functional, rather than:
A) Waiting for a mystical tracker to appear from the mists, ready to do what we all want
B) Wait for whatever that MOD thing was that #utopiasoft's topic line said was coming next week, back in 2008.
C) Use that other weird ass music program that was on Zeograd's site that made my face itch.
I got tired of waiting. I said something like "hey oldman, look at this. there's a BIOS PSG player just sitting there ready to be used. What the f*ck are we waiting for?"
Dave had some kind of demo for the PSG player on Zeograd. I once asked for info on it and a document he wrote awhileeeee ago, unfortunately, he blew me off. I don't know why. Playing dumb, legitimately forgot he wrote something, who knows. Who cares.
So after some of our poking, prodding, buying Develo book, looking at "how does MSX do it" complete with conferring with others who did or have done this commercially, and experimenting lead to the various iterations of Squirrel.
I wonder if I still have the one laying around that I wrote. It parsed and played from included MML data, instead of using the compiled one. There might even be a demo floating around of the Frog theme from Chrono Trigger that used it. I one day intended to use it for a live-play MIDI interface, but never got around to it because games.
I even wrote a music compiler for it; human readable music notation - not code or data defines. It's mml-ish too. But definitely not as fancy or advanced as Squirrel. But at the end of it the day, if someone wanted to support a new music engine - Azazel is not it. Just as I think the syscard PSG player is not it. A good solid month would get you something soo much better.
Oh. I didn't know you finished that compiler. That was awhile ago. Where is it?
So why not take that, what we know, and simply make a new open source music engine?
Because, I see a few things going down.
1) It will be made by non-musicians*
2) Egos and overconfidence will f*ck up an open source project pretty bad. (Please, never say "I could've done that in a day" or "a solid month". It almost always leads to foot-in-mouth, lol)
3) Endless chasing of the dragons will lead to it never being done.
Just to note: A tracker does not have to specifically output "patterned" music, just because that's how the interface layer works form the musician's perspective. The final output can easily be "command string" format. I would argue that it SHOULD be command-string based. Why? Because that supports everything.
This is what my friend's software for MSX is going to do, AFAIK.
*= What I mean by this is not meant to be insulting. I noticed this first when I looked at Dave's documentation he wrote. He had translated stuff about MML and put a
next to the translation of Dal Segno, implying he had no clue what the hell the katakana was trying to say, or what it even meant. I was like "shit, I forgot there's people who don't know how to read sheet music."
There is a strong difference between musicians, and programmers. I happen to be both, and had to help bridge the gap with OldMan when we were doing Squirrel to make sure the thing was usable and made sense. Some stuff that makes programmatic sense makes nearly no sense from a musical usability standpoint.
LOL, I remember at one point, I said "if we do that, you can't really do hopping bass lines" and OldMan said "so don't do those", and I was like "agjioagagajiogajioajasdfj34f4f", because yknow, hopping octave-shift bass lines are more or less some of the quintessential stuff from the 80s. We got it all sorted out. lol.
Now, because many (most? all?) of you that code are not musicians/composers, you will likely have issues with getting usable, functional stuff without the direct input and considerations of people who make the music.
I draw a line between musicians and composers, too.
All composers are musicians.
Not all musicians are composers.
Musicians may be better to survey for usability (how do I touch this), but composers are probably better for functionality and "is this how it should work."
EDIT: Oh, here it is
http://aetherbyte.com/downloadables/pgd.pceIt's still on Aetherbyte, lol.
http://aetherbyte.com/downloadables/Defender.wav Oh, a version of Atlantean's level tune from before I changed the leads.
http://aetherbyte.com/downloadables/sotb.mp3SHADOW OF THE BEAST.
yeahhhhhh.
