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Text File | 1996-09-27 | 8.9 KB | 226 lines

DCPlayer - another pulsating Blender Software (BS) production ------------------------------------------------------------- It's yet another music CD player. This one takes very little memory, only 3% CPU time, works in the background, and watches the joypad or joystick plugged into controller port 1 on the CD32 or the game port on normal Amigas. So now you can play CDs whilst doing something else using Workbench. When you want to swap CDs, skip tracks, or something like that press a button on the joypad and carry on with what you were doing before instead of messing about shuffling through windows or screens, clicking on something, then finding your way back. I wrote it to help me to sample CDs though. Connect a sampler from the CD32's audio output to the SX-1's parallel port, load up this, load up some sample software, and use this to skip to the right place BEFORE starting to sample. Easy, eh? At the moment nobody's found out a way of ripping music straight from CD to memory with cd.device, so this is the easiest way (just try it with the mouse on the other CD players to see what I mean). So, what does it work on? ------------------------- Er, the CD32. You'll need to be able to use the Workbench or a shell. You can do that with a keyboard, a serial link which connects to the Aux port, or the SX-1 or CD32x which connect to the expansion port. It should also work on Kickstart 2 or above Amigas with CD drives, provided that you're running some kind of CD32 emulation software and you've got lowlevel.library in the LIBS: directory. Some examples... - An A600 or A1200 with the Archos Overdrive CD drive. - An A600 or A1200 with the Hisoft Squirrel or Power CD drive (both these drives are really the same). - Any Amiga with Cache-CDFS and an IDE or SCSI CD drive. - Any Amiga with Kickstart 3.1 and a SCSI-2 CD drive. It doesn't work with the CDTV or A570 because those machines use cdtv.device and I don't have any info on that. So there. Installing ---------- Drag the icon to your C: drawer or some other drawer that you've got set aside for programs. That's it. Have some Battenburg cake. Options ------- All of the options can be used in the tooltype list (click on DCPlayer and choose Information from the Icons menu to get this) if you run it from Workbench or placed after the program name if you run it from the shell. Read out options... - SHOW=<type> You get a little read out on the screen of what's happening. It's really a sprite, so it doesn't matter if you flip screens or have an autoscrolling Workbench screen, it always stays there. The types are TRACK, STARTCD, STARTTRACK, ENDTRACK, ENDCD, and CHANGE. Each type gives you a different read out (the names are obvious enough) but you can change it whilst DCPlayer is running with the SHUFFLE button (if you've got a CD32 joypad). - COLOUR1=<R><G><B> COLOUR2=<R><G><B> COLOUR3=<R><G><B> The highlight, shadowed, and bright colours of the read out. Each R, G, and B number ranges from 0 to 9 or A to F (for 10 to 15). You can't leave a space between the numbers. If you want, you can use COLOR. - LEFT=<number> The distance from the left edge of the screen to the read out. 0 is the far left and 319 is the far right (but it could be a bit more if you've got an overscanned screen). - TOP=<number> The distance from the top edge of the screen to the read out. 0 is the top and 255 (or 199 for NTSC) is the bottom edge (or a bit more for overscan). CD options... - EMULATION=<type> Make buggy CD32 emulation work. See the emulation doc file for more info. - LOOP=<type> Start up DCPlayer in repeat play mode. The options are REPEAT and REPEAT1, but you can change it with the LOOP button (if you've got a CD32 joypad). - PLAY=<track> Start DCPlayer playing a CD, if there's a CD in the drive and the track exists. Or you can give RANDOM if you want, which starts the thing off in random play mode. Switches... - CHANGE Short for SHOW=CHANGE. Kept for compatibility with older versions. Aren't I kind? - DISPLAY Short for SHOW=TRACK. Kept for com... Zzzz... - NOBACKDROPS If it's using pen sharing and it couldn't get the pens it needed then it removes Workbench's backdrops from the screen, tries again, replaces the backdrops, and lets them fight over the remaining pens, unless you use this option. - NOLORES On AGA computers, it makes sprites on the Workbench screen lo-res in all screen modes (to stop the read out looking thin in eg. super hi-res), unless you give this option. For non-AGA computers, this option's on all the time whether you choose it or not. - NOPENS On Kickstart 3 computers with more than 16 colours on the Workbench screen, it tries to stop the screen setting the read out's pen colours by using pen sharing, unless you give this option. For non-Kickstart 3 computers, this option's on all the time whether you choose it or not. - NORESET Turn off the reset on eject option, for anyone who booted from CD and doesn't want the CD32 to reset as soon as the boot CD is removed. If you want to put this program on a PD CD then it's probably a good idea to delete the brackets either side of this option in the tooltypes list. The defaults are no read outs, some very tasteful colours, the left edge just a little bit away from the right of the screen, the top edge just a little bit away from the bottom of the screen, no changes for buggy CD32 emulation, no repeat play, don't play any tracks, backdrops on, lo-res on, pen sharing on, and leave the reset on eject alone. Screen modes that need a lot of the computer's time to display (eg. DblPAL, DblNTSC, Super72, and probably more) can't use many sprites. 'Cos of this, sometimes the read out might not even appear, but you can try using less colours or shrinking the overscan size so less time is taken up. If you've got lo-res sprites or pen sharing, you can't change the Workbench screen (eg. you can't use things such as overscan, palette, or screen mode prefs). You have to quit DCPlayer and then click on Retry. If you don't like this, use NOLORES and NOPENS. Running ------- From the Workbench, click on the icon once to start it and again to stop it. From the shell, type "DCPlayer" to start it and hit CTRL-C to stop it. Or you can use "Run <>NIL: DCPlayer" to start it and the same again to stop it. The "Break" command works too. To run it all the time, drag it to your WBStartup drawer or put "Run <>NIL: DCPlayer" at the end of your User-Startup. Controls -------- The CD32 joypad is used in almost the same way as it is in the CD32's music CD player, but there are a few differences. The stop button really stops the CD if you press it twice. Skipping through tracks is slightly different. The play button opens or closes the drive door. If the CD is stopped, pressing reverse/forward/stop will quit and pressing the shuffle button will start the CD playing in random play mode. If the CD isn't stopped, the shuffle button will shuffle through the kind of read out you get - this is useful for finding the exact part of a CD you want to sample. Just for those people who've had a lobotomy the types are - the track number, the time since the start of the CD, the time since the start of the track, the time to the end of the track, the time to the end of the CD, and only display changes for a short time (say when a new track has started to play, the track number will appear for a little while then disappear). If you don't have a CD32 joypad you can also use a Megadrive joypad, a Master System joypad, or a two button joystick instead. With these you can't eject CDs, use random play, change the read out, repeat tracks, or quit using the controller. A shocking loss as I'm sure you'll agree. Finally if you've got an old crappy single fire button joystick you miss out on all that lot and you can't stop the CD either (but you can still pause it though). Function CD32 joypad Others -------- ----------- ------ Play/Pause Select Fire Stop/Really stop Stop (2nd fire) Eject/Close Play (3rd fire) Search < Reverse Up Search > Forward Down Track < Left Left Track > Right Right Random play/Read out Shuffle None/Repeat/Repeat 1 Loop Quit Reverse/Forward/Stop Boring wibble ------------- This is copyrighted by me but freely distributible. It shouldn't be altered in any way and you should only charge for disks, postage, or packing if you charge anything. If something goes wrong (it crashes, an android appears from a trapdoor in the floor and blows up your CD32, etc...) then I can't be held responsible for the mess - you use this program at your own risk. After all, it's free - what more do you want? And it can't be used as part of anything that's sold for profit without my say so, although the chances of that are fairly remote, I think. Oh, that means cover CDs and disks on those glossy magazines as well. My Email address is dan@blender.demon.co.uk, if you spot a bug or something. Dan.