The keyboard do not understand "edit" anymore, normally activated by spacebar in FT2. So one can not write any notes or values, eg pattern data.It works to name instruments or files, then all keys, space included, works! And so does all FT2 fastkeys.
And if one hits "record pattern", which should of course put the program in edit-mode, but then still it is impossible to enter any pattern data! The one exception is capslock that produces the notebreak symbol in the pattern, but that is all.
D-fend reloaded settings that comes with a inbuilt download option of FT2 gives me the same bug, and it is still there under dosbox-x as well. I have tried it on two different win8 computers now.
What on earth is wrong?!!??
(EDIT: This forum do not display well under my handheld, and now I see that the darn thing is posted under the wrong flag since this is hardly old-school hardware but emulation. If a moderator feel like moving it to a better place, feel free. sorry for the inconvenience.)
Doing a little "code art" project this week. Every day, I'll release a brand-new ZX Spectrum 1-bit/beeper routine. Releases will be posted in this thread on the 1-Bit Forum.
Check out the demo tune for Day 1 on my soundcloud, yo!
I was looking forward to start rocking in HoustonTracker 2 today, but I got stuck on getting the sync to my PC working.
I have a TI83+ and gray Graph Link /w serial port. I'm on win7 64bit. This is my cable:
In the TiLP settings I have selected GrayLink and TI83+. When clicking Ready or DirList I get the error: "Msg: timeout occured while reading from the device. Cause: check that link cable is plugged and/or the calculator is ready." Some times I get the error above with this text after: "The system cannot find the path specified".
Also when I start TiLP, my calculator freezes (the cursor stops blinking). I tried all ports in the settings and only one causes the freezing - I guess this is the correct one.
The calculator can send/receive to another TI83+ without problems. I think I have missed something basic here.
After 8 months of hard work, it's time 4 da calculator!
About HoustonTracker 2
HoustonTracker 2 is a music editor/sequencer for the Texas Instruments TI-82, TI-83/82STATS, and TI-83+/84+/SE. It allows you to compose and play multi-channel 1-bit music directly on your TI graphic calculator.
Features
• 3 tone channels • 1 non-interrupting drum channel • up to 128 note patterns • up to 64 drum/fx patterns • sequence length up to 255 pattern rows • 16-bit frequency precision • 8-bit speed precision, can be configured per step • various effects, including: - L/C/R stereo hard-panning for tone and drum channels - 8bit duty cycle control - duty cycle sweep • 2 user definable samples • up to 8 savestates • edit during playback
I bought a Talking Computron from a yardsale a while ago, and I figured this forum might be a good pace to find out more about it.
I bought it originally because I though it would be similar to a Speak and Spell, and because it was only a dollar. Can't pass that up. I brought it home and plugged it in, and it worked great. I explored the built-in activities, but I was really only interested in the 'Memory Tone' game (where you use a keyboard to play notes) and the 'Say It' game, where the Computron cycles through different words and says them.
After I had finished, I set out to mod it, adding a 1/4" jack to the side for audio out and a small switch on the bottom, nestled away under the keyboard for turning the internal speaker on and off.
I can't find very much about it online, except that it was an educational toy made by sold by Sears in the late 80's, which is fairly obvious. I'd really like to know more about the cartridges, though, like what cartridges were there and what did each one do? Thanks a bunch.
So recently I bought an amstrad cpc for making AY tunes and I've been happily messing with VortexTracker and doing a few tracks on it. But the bad thing about Vortex is that I can only work on my tracks at home.
That's why I started to look up alternative ways to make ay songs and I found out a promising one but now I'm a little bit blocked. What I've been trying is to use a speccy emulator (Unreal Speccy for Android) and run Golden Disk's ProTracker, which is very similar to Vortex.
The thing is that I can't find any user manual or tutorial, and I only figured out a few controls, for example: I got how to move the cursor in the grid, mouse, delete, put notes and values on the grid, edit 'samples' BUT once I click Play I don't know how to pause the whole thing.
Does anybody know if there's an user manual? Otherwise I would like to know how to stop/play the song/pattern and a few block functions like copy&pasta.
Thanks to Deflemask's sweet sweet "save ROM" feature, I can turn a song into a .hes file, which most PCE/Turbografx emulators recognize, but I can't get any of them to start actually playing the sound back.
Do I need some kind of ROM wrapper to make them .pce files or something? I read online that .hes files SHOULD be able to just play on the hardware/emulator with use of the 1 and 2 buttons, but thus far I can't get any playback.
I've tried Magic Engine (doesn't see the .hes file), Ootake and HuGo.
STarKos is a really good tracker, it's similar to Arkos but it's native Amstrad CPC, not windows. Anyway it's not ZX spectrum but if you're interested in making AY music it could be an option. STarKos is rather user friendly and conveniant to use.
Back to ZX spectrum tracking, the most famous is probably SoundTracker 1.1, as pointed earlier.
I'm trying to use it but I have a few questions, which are not really covered in the tutorials we can find.
1/ Is it possible to delete / insert a row? I can erase a single note with "enter", but I can't find a way to remove or add a row.
2/ In the sample editor, first screen, I don't understand the 0 and 1 thing. 0 should mean it will let the sound pass. 1 won't let it pass. Anyway, even when in a column the 1 is set, if I change the column to maximum volume it will sound different than if the volume is low.
3/ in the sample editor, second screen, I don't understand the two colums, especially the second one. If I enter 128, what does it mean? 1/2 tone? Also it seems only the first colum is taken into account, when I enter values in the second column it's only heard when I'm on this second column, not the first. And back in the tracker, it seems I can only hear the ornaments from the first column...
This is the thread where I am going to give out all my information that I have learned over these past years when making music with ms-dos. It is geared towards beginners that never had much experience with old pc's or ms-dos and want to try something new.
Congratulations!! Thank you for choosing Sound Blaster 16 as your song composing medium. May your music flourish with each changing parameter....
Overview:
Let's get right down to business. I know a lot of you would prefer to go the laptop route, since it is a complete system in one. However, what I have discovered (during heavy testing and field comparisons) is that there is much tone difference between sound cards. And the desktop sound blaster 16 ISA cards have much better overall sound quality than any other sound blaster 16 compatible laptop. There are also sound differences between different versions of Sound Blaster 16 cards, which I will get into later. But yes, you will probably end up spending a little bit more money on getting a desktop up and running, but believe me, its WELL WORTH IT. I use sb16 compatible laptops (ESS Audiodrive) when I play live, but I write and record off a desktop with a real Sound Blaster 16 since it sounds way better.
You can run into some other issues as well. There were times I have made a song on one of the laptops in Adlib Tracker II, then put in on the desktop to play back and record. Some of the instrument patches were way off, and others were even playing back at wrong volumes. So, you can choose to either modify on the desktop to make it sound how you want or just record off the laptop and deal with the "sound character loss." If you are just doing sample tracking, it doesn't matter. Everything sounds the same when changing from laptop to desktop, from what I have found personally. It is just the change from going to emulated fm synthesis SB16 to real fm synthesis SB16.
What to get:
All my laptops and desktops have Pentium I processors. If you go the desktop route you can safely go up to a Pentium 3 processor, but everyone will just say its overkill. If you plan to do gaming though, then I would suggest going with the Pentium 3, and a decent graphics card. Then you can pretty much play any game that came out between 1988 to 1999 or maybe even earlier. Some later games will require Windows 95/98 however.
The laptops I have are maxed out at 150 mb of ram or so, and I have never had a problem with any song I have made, with sample time, or any game from the dos era. For all dos tracking, I would say 128mb is a nice amount to have.
Sound Cards (desktops):
YIKES. This took awhile to figure out the best one, but now you can skip all that jazz !
Sound Blaster 16 CT1740. This is the one you want. And these are ISA sound cards, as opposed to PCI, so make sure your motherboard has an ISA slot !!!
They are getting harder and harder to find, but by far the best sounding one. I wish I still had the audio recordings I did a couple years back, that clearly showed the tone difference in the Sound Blaster 16 models. This is 100 percent true OPL3 (ymf262) , and has nice sound quality with minimal noise output compared to other models. And I have tried pretty much all variations of them.
Sound Cards (laptops):
It seems that the most popular choices for sb16 compatible laptops are either Compaq or Toshiba. We are just going to forget about Toshiba altogether. They are just royal pains to configure, features they have, work with, etc. The Compaq Armada line is what you want!!!
Compaq Armada 7770 series
This was the first model I ever bought to test and see if it would take an ms-dos install, and run some trackers. And it did just that with no problems. It boots to cd automatically (huge advantage even having a cd drive too). And its swappable if you want to put in a floppy drive.
If you were to get your hands on any of the Compaq Armada 7xxx series models, I am 99.9 percent confident you will have no troubles with installing ms-dos, and no problems getting sound to work whatsoever. Just pop is the dos cd and turn it on!!
Here are some specific models that I have owned and can 100 percent confirm that they work.
Compaq Armada 7700 DMT Compaq Armada 7770 DMT Compaq Armada 7510 MT Compaq Armada 7730 MT Compaq Armada 7710 MT Compaq Armada 7360 DMT Compaq Armada 7800 Compaq Armada 7400 Compaq Armada 3500 Compaq Presario 1640
If you want to be super safe, just get the 77xx models.
Another plus about these models is the parallel port. So just pick up a zip drive on ebay for like $6, and you are ready to transfer. Well, you'd obviously then need a USB zip drive too, to send to another computer for backup. And as mentioned before, these laptops read cds, and even burned cds. I never had any trouble with it. Some older laptops dont read burned cds at all, so again these Compaq Armadas have great features, and are fully capable of running any dos tracker you can throw at it.
Some other Compaq models that work :
Compaq 15xx dmt series Compaq 17xx series
These are much older than the Armada laptops, will most likely max out at 32 or 64 mb of ram, and not have a cd drive.
The sound card in these laptops are ESS Audio drive cards. They are 100 percent sound blaster 16 compatible, and in the ms-dos install (which I will post the zip file for) contains these drivers. So there is no configurations needed!
Just unzip it, and burn it exactly how it is to a cd. When you are installing, it asks you if you want to install sound cards. Just select the ESS AUDIODRIVE one, and you are good to go!
This version of dos also has a nice file browser. When you are in dos, just type "vc" then enter, and it will pull it up. Now you can browse your files, if you are not that savvy with dos commands yet.
Trackers:
Oh so many to choose from!! The ones I prefer are:
Impulse Tracker 2.14 (64 sample channels of mayhem!) Adlib Tracker II (18 channel FM synthesis only) Nerd Tracker (NES tracker)
If you want rip it up and jump right into AT2, here is a short tutorial I made to help get you started:
Also, here is a tiny album I made containing some useful Adlib Tracker II stuff. It includes 34 instruments I created and 2 songs demonstrating them.
The zip file contains:
-All the instruments in one file ("O2INST.a2m") -Individual Instrument folder (Adlib Tracker instrument format) -2 songs demonstrating the instruments provided in Adlib Tracker song format and mp3 format
Purchase desktop with an ISA slot, and Sound Blaster 16 CT1740 sound card or Purchase Compaq Armada 7xxx series laptop Download Ms-Dos 7.1 ( http://www.planetzaxxon.com/dos71.zip ) Burn it to a CD Put CD in drive, and boot to CD. The Compaq laptops will boot to it automatically. Install Ms-Dos. During install, select ESS AUDIO DRIVE as sound card. Reboot after install Now copy any trackers you want to the computer from a cd or zip drive The best one to try first is Adlib Tracker II, just to make sure sound works correctly. http://www.adlibtracker.net/download.php If sound is wacky or jumbled up, then you just need to change one setting in the adtrack2.ini file. You can edit this file in dos by browsing to the AT2 directory and typing "edit adtrack2.ini" Scroll down until you see the "opl_latency=0" line. Change the 0 to a "1" and then save. Reboot. And now sound should playback normally.
I also found this neat application for MS-DOS a while back, and it works for the ESS AUDIODRIVE cards too. "SBVOL.EXE," It allows you to adjust master output as well as the master volume of the FM chip. Or even your line input. You can download it here:
Here is some Info about installing an SSD in your oldie laptop. Fun fun !!
So I have been trying out some solid state drives/CF to IDE converters. I will specify here which ones I found have that work and which didn't. The advantages when using these are:
Less noisey sound output. This is huge !!! With a traditional IDE drive installed, whenever I would load a new song in Impulse Tracker, I could hear the actual hard drive being accessed. It's an audible noise. With the SSD installed, there is no more loading time noise! Also, fast load times! Such performance!
These were tested on Compaq Armada laptops, models: 7770, 7770DMT.
THE GOOD:
Super Talent 4GB IDE SSD
Just got some today. They work great. However, you MUST do all partitioning/formatting within MS-DOS. It does not like it if you hook this up to a modern (windows 7) PC and partition and format. Even if you partitiong to FAT32, once you put the SSD in the laptop MS-DOS doesnt install correctly or won't detect. You must use FDISK, and then FORMAT on your MS-DOS machine itself. Or after running FDISK and setting it up, you can run the DOS 7.1 install since it contains FORMAT built-in.
SYBA 2.5 IDE to dual compact flash drive
**Shown inside Armada 7770DMT caddy
Works awesome. However, only works awesome with Sandisk Ultra II 15mb/s compact flash cards. I only tried with 4GB ones. It should be fine with the 8GB ones. But other brands I tried like DANE-ELEC or TRANSCEND, it did not like/did not detect. So stick to Sandisk cards (older ones) with this IDE to CF adapter. Same applies to above, you MUST do all partitioning and formatting from the MS-DOS computer for it work/detect properly.
THE BAD
Swissbit 8GB SSD
Very finicky, I only got one drive to work in one of my machines, when all the other setups/combos worked in all or none. So I would stay away from those!
That's all the brands I have tried so far. Hope this helps some of you out!! The easiest ones to get a hold of are the SYBA adapters and SANDISK ULTRA II compact flash cards.
BONUS!!!
If you are one of the very few to be rocking a desktop. I have put an SSD in one of those too. I installed a 2.5 inch 32GB Sandisk SATA drive, with a SATA to IDE adaptor. Works great in DOS !!
If anyone else has tried other brands/configurations feel free to let us all know!
This is a good basis to get started with. Feel free to post any questions on this thread, or message me. I will update this info as I think of more things to mention, or other tips and tricks.
I would like to create a Win32 program that reads/extracts data from the .vtx or .afx or .ay file format. I have not yet found any documentation on how to read the music content. I have read the header of a .vtx but the bytes that make up the register/instructions are still a mystery.
Can anyone point me to firm docs on how to read these formats? I want to write them out to ASCII so the sequencing and instructions will live on and can be replayed on other places.
I have made a shield for Arduino to turn a normal Arduino in a fully functional YM2151 midi module. I have programmed the Arduino to receive midi notes from a keyboard to play these notes and to receive CC messages to adjust the tone I have also programmed a panel in CTRLR to control all the CC messages to adjust the tone. I have ordered 10 PCB's so if anyone is interested. It is a fully functional 8 voice, 4 operator FM synthesizer. Demo at: https://youtu.be/uvQk5IbCYwE
Will it be ok for everybody, if I periodically post the updates here? I'll try to post only interesting and useful news. Like, for example: There is now a web-radio on ZX-Art. You can now listen to the best ZX Spectrum music directly in your browser: there is game radio, demoscene radio, 1bit beeper radio and exotic formats like Digital AY and TSFM. You are welcomed to listen!
I would be very glad if you could give it a try, then leave some feedback about usability here, or even register and vote for some of the best melodies - some of the authors are still active on ZX-Spectrum
I'm considering buying an ST for music production and I'm wondering if anyone has any recommendations for software I can use. Are there any sampler programs available for the machine? What is the easiest tracker to use? Also will I have any trouble with an NTSC machine? I'd really appreciate any help.
So I recently got a GP2X and it came with firmware 3.0 & after using it for awhile the screen started to glitch so i figured it way something on the SD (but really it was low battery, I didn't know how much it eats them) so i formatted it and attempted to put the same firmware on it and it would update then the boot screen came on and it just freezes from there....after awhile of that I tried a few other versions and it would get past boot screen and say "Patch Error." So (for some reason) I thought I should clean my PC and after re-downloading the firmware its right back to being stuck on the boot screen...Could this possibly be from something wrong with the SD I'm using (I'm using SD not SDHC)? Any help will be much appreciated cuz I've been talking to e.s.c about this all morning and we cant figure out what the issue could be.
/Creative%20Sound%20Blaster%2016%20ASP%20CT1740_resize.jpg)
