Commander X16

DreamTracker Dev Log

DreamTracker is a native music tracker inspired by ImpulseTracker and written in assembly from the Commander X16.

Latest Version: 0.71

A demosong showing off some of the current features:



To get it, head over to www.dreamtracker.org.

Have a "pause mode" that stops the UI elements from being loaded (Obviously, that would require the user to NOT be able to use them while swapping disks.)

As long as all the needed swap elements are on each disk used, that might be ok.

Daedalus wrote: ↑Fri Sep 22, 2023 12:06 am Have a "pause mode" that stops the UI elements from being loaded (Obviously, that would require the user to NOT be able to use them while swapping disks.)

As long as all the needed swap elements are on each disk used, that might be ok.

I tried that last night just to see if it that would work without any code modifications. It didn't, which isn't too surprising but would've been nice I suspect the problem on reinsert is needed to cd back into the directory the app is running under.

The cartridge option is otherwise quite a detour just to work around that (and would have other challenges, like code in ROM needing to do kernel calls, a flash process, etc.); but I do kinda like that idea if CRAM is needed for samples anyway and I can jam in a simple MIDI interface for optional external clock sync. Not everyone is gonna need those so having a "normal" version of the tracker is probably a good idea though.

Sure, you would need to save the current directory first, then CD back to it on release of the mode. But you'll probably never be able to stop jumping through this hoop.

If it was me as the user? I would just know about this ahead of time (Sure, I might get bitten the first time.) and store all the files I wanted to use on the SDcard before I even started the program. And if I screwed that up, I would be all "Oopsie!" and close the program, copy the files, restart the program.

Having 2 SDcards would be great, but we don't got 2 SDcards.

That's what I do The gotcha there is if I have the tracker already loaded and wanna just quickly grab something from my PC and copy it over, I have to soft-boot the thing again. The longest load times at the moment are loading the song though (that's because I'm not yet using MATPTR for that so it'll get a great deal faster).

This did happen to me last night while messing around with my Running (No Doubt) chiptune cover where I wanted to copy the updated song without having to reboot, cd back to the dir, start the program, etc.

To be that's not a dealbreaker. Certainly not over the tracker core features. It's kinda polish. But it's good polish.

Changing SD cards would be useful. It's never quite occured to me. We have SD cards
like this

https://www.amazon.com/Memory-Adapter-A ... 9hdGY&th=1

I don't know what you would want in a program for an 8 bit system that couldn't be put on 1 card ???

ahenry3068 wrote: ↑Mon Sep 25, 2023 12:28 am Changing SD cards would be useful. It's never quite occured to me. We have SD cards
like this

https://www.amazon.com/Memory-Adapter-A ... 9hdGY&th=1

I don't know what you would want in a program for an 8 bit system that couldn't be put on 1 card ???

It's more like, you just booted DreamTracker and, oh snap, you forgot to copy that latest awesome song you downloaded off IRC onto the card to play it. So you yoink the SD card, copy the file and put it back in. That doesn't work today. DT doesn't take a huge amount of time to start but it's not instant. There are ways I can help improve the load times though to the point rebooting the system and restarting the program wouldn't be a huge burden.

That sounds like a good argument for some bit of network connectivity too.

Grab that off of a "X16SHARE" directory residing somewhere on a LAN or the CLOUD

Yup! I think one solve for that may be here soon via Wavicle veraESPcial. Not sure how I'll handle that myself. I like that it's offline by default and I can just shut off the Internet and go tracking with it. I'll want some network connectivity too when I feel like though as well such that I'm rather excited about the prospects of a NIC or some sort of terminal card.

I suppose depending on what supports those get, could be possible for DT to reach across the wire (or ether in the case of wireless) to load a song file from the network as long as the kernel routines I'm using support that.