3 ms·

> By using MAME as emulation backend, a vast array of 8- and 16-bit platforms are covered. That's genius!

rob74 3y ago
They weren't the first ones to come up with the idea though: there is at least one music player (which I only heard of a few days ago thanks to another thread here) called UADE (http://zakalwe.fi/uade/uade.html http://zakalwe.fi/uade/uade.html) which runs UAE (an Amiga emulator) in the background, with the emulator running Eagleplayer (the "most comprehensive soundplayer for the Amiga"). I wonder how Bintracker gets around the requirement of having to write native code that actually plays the music on all the various platforms? But I guess that a stub that just "pipes" the data through to the emulated sound hardware is relatively easy to write.
- mhd 3y ago
  > I wonder how Bintracker gets around the requirement of having to write native code that actually plays the music on all the various platforms? But I guess that a stub that just "pipes" the data through to the emulated sound hardware is relatively easy to write. It looks that way. There's binary files for the MAME Bridge, which probably orchestrate the raw music data. If I remember correctly, that's rather common on the original platforms, too. On the C64, there were a few "music routines" that marshaled patterns of notes to the SID chip. One famous example being that of composer Rob Hubbard[1], whose "One Man and his Droid" still lives rent-free in my head. Chicken Scheme, Tk and MAME seem like a very cool tech stack for this. [1]: https://www.1xn.org/text/C64/rob_hubbards_music.txt https://www.1xn.org/text/C64/rob_hubbards_music.txt
  - rob74 3y ago
    I wish somebody built a version of the article you linked where you can actually click on the tunes he mentions and play them. Talking about music without being able to hear it is a bit... dry (I never had a C64, I upgraded from the Atari 800 to the Amiga, so I'm not that into SID chiptunes).

They weren't the first ones to come up with the idea though: there is at least one music player (which I only heard of a few days ago thanks to another thread here) called UADE (http://zakalwe.fi/uade/uade.html http://zakalwe.fi/uade/uade.html) which runs UAE (an Amiga emulator) in the background, with the emulator running Eagleplayer (the "most comprehensive soundplayer for the Amiga"). I wonder how Bintracker gets around the requirement of having to write native code that actually plays the music on all the various platforms? But I guess that a stub that just "pipes" the data through to the emulated sound hardware is relatively easy to write.

mhd 3y ago
> I wonder how Bintracker gets around the requirement of having to write native code that actually plays the music on all the various platforms? But I guess that a stub that just "pipes" the data through to the emulated sound hardware is relatively easy to write. It looks that way. There's binary files for the MAME Bridge, which probably orchestrate the raw music data. If I remember correctly, that's rather common on the original platforms, too. On the C64, there were a few "music routines" that marshaled patterns of notes to the SID chip. One famous example being that of composer Rob Hubbard[1], whose "One Man and his Droid" still lives rent-free in my head. Chicken Scheme, Tk and MAME seem like a very cool tech stack for this. [1]: https://www.1xn.org/text/C64/rob_hubbards_music.txt https://www.1xn.org/text/C64/rob_hubbards_music.txt
- rob74 3y ago
  I wish somebody built a version of the article you linked where you can actually click on the tunes he mentions and play them. Talking about music without being able to hear it is a bit... dry (I never had a C64, I upgraded from the Atari 800 to the Amiga, so I'm not that into SID chiptunes).