The Best of Mecomp Multimedia 2/MECOMP-CD-II.iso/amiga/sound/myst/docs/myst.txt

Text File | 1998-01-14 | 30.6 KB | 649 lines

            MYST, The YM2149 ST Emulator
           © 1997-98 by Nicolas Pomarede (Mr.Styckx)
            release 1.0 (15/01/1998)

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                  MAIN DOC
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================================================================================


Introduction
Distribution
Requirement
Installation
The Story Behind It
Technical Words
Bonus Screen
History
Acknowledgements
Contact Address


================================================================================

Introduction
------------

MYST is an emulator able to play musics for the Yamaha YM-2149 soundchip, which
was used on the Atari ST. It consists of two main programs : a player
compatible with EaglePlayer and DeliTracker, and a binary file which just
generate Amiga sounds depending on the state of the emulator registers. This
means that although MYST is specialized in emulating ST songs, there's a
standalone binary which could be incorporated in your own programs if you want,
for example, to emulate Amstrad CPC or ZX Spectrum musics (these computers used
the AY version of the chip, which had the same registers, but a different
clock speed).

MYST currently supports all known effects used on Atari ST, that is any number
of samples at the same time, handling of hardware enveloppes, as well as
emulation of timer generated enveloppes (the famous 'SID env', named so because
they emulate the C64 square env behaviour).

MYST also provides a general header interface, useful to store informations
about the composer, the number of songs, the replay time, ... as well as a
general mechanism to init and play absolute addressing replay or music with
replay and data in different files. This header can be used on both Amiga and
ST, so you should be able to play all the musics included on Atari ST also (see
YMST.format for possible restrictions on musics using timer). Since the header
allows for hardware abstraction, this could also be a good way of playing these
tunes on PC (you would need a 68000, but you wouldn't have to care about
hardware addressing specific to the ST).

The header allows 3 types of music files :
    - internal replay : replay and data are stored in the same file.
    - external replay : the file is only a replay, used to play specific
        data file. Useful for musics sharing the same replay.
    - music data : only the data. The file contains the name of the
        required replay (should be in the same directory).

The goal of MYST is to provide a suitable interface to collect and play all
available songs, thus creating the biggest ST musics collection ever. All
musics are stored in their original format (that is exactly the same as what
the author wrote) to ensure the maximum respect of the author's work ; all
patching and relocating occur after. This means that if you don't like MYST at
all, you can extract the original replay and music data from the MYST file, and
you will obtain absolutly the same data that was in the game or demo the music
comes from (so it should always be possible to play the music on ST in case the
header doesn't work).



================================================================================

Distribution
------------

MYST is FREEWARE. This means you can copy it and redistribute it as you like.
However, you shouldn't make any profit with MYST, and all material used to
distribute shouldn't be sold for more than the cost of reproduction and
distribution. In other words, it's forbiden to make any profit with MYST (I
release it as FREE, so I won't accept other people make money on my back).

You can of course put the MYST distribution on any Internet ftp or www site you
like, but only if you respect one of these 2 conditions:
 - you either put all the files of this distibution in their original archived
   state.
 - or you put only the files you like, BUT then you MUST give some pointers to
   some ftp or www sites containing the whole distribution (the main
   distribution site for MYST will be the Aminet archive, which has many
   mirrors around the globe and provide quality archiving since many years).

Although MYST is freeware and don't require you to send me any money, I would
welcome any gift ; I'm especially looking for any CD compilations of all the
games that were released on ST, to be able to convert more and more musics. So
if you have some CD with games or demos compilations and would like to
participate to the development of the biggest ST music collection ever, don'
hesitate to contact me. Also if you don't have anything to add to MYST but just
like the concept, mail me your suggestions and/or remarks.



================================================================================

Requirement
-----------

Since MYST was developed on an A500 with OS1.3 and 2.1, there shouldn't be any
severe hardware requirements. The YMPlayer was tested with both EaglePlayer
1.54 and DeliTracker II (I wasn' able to test it under Eagleplayer 2, since it
requires a 68020). The only memory used is the one to load YMPlayer in chip
memory (that is less than 50 Kb). Of course, you then need enough memory to
load the desired YMST file (files are loaded in CHIP memory, in case some
samples are used). All in all, even a simple A500 with only .5 Mb of CHIP
should be able to play tunes.
The YMPlayer was written with Eagleplayer support in mind (sorry for all
DeliTracker lovers, but I think EP is really better, and v1.54 still support my
good old OS 1.3, thus saving me 0.5 Mb of FAST ram needed to load the OS 2.1),
this means that I've added sample info support, so you can have some nice
quadrascopes floating on your screen showing the generated waveforms, as well
as some info on the current music (composer, year, ...). Of course, subsongs
are accessible from both EP and DT.



================================================================================

Installation
------------

First, you need of course to have Eagleplayer and/or Delitracker installed
before. There's only one file needed : YMPlayer. Copy it in your standard
player directory (if you don't remember where is this dir, choose add player in
EP/DT, this will open a file selector in your current player dir ; note the
path and copy YMPLayer in it, and that's all).

If using EaglePlayer, don't forget to add a line looking like the following in
envarc:eagleplayers/eagleplayers.batch :

YM.*    =    "path/of/your/player/dir/YMPlayer"
This will increase recognition of YMST files when loading them.

You can then create a dir anywhere you like (e.g. at the same place you usually
keep your other music files) and copy all the files from the YM2149 directory
in it.

There isn't anything else to do, so I don't think installation requires a
script or something like that.

If you want to save some disk space, I would also recommend you to pack all the
YM.* file with xpk (which is automatically depacked by EP/DT). I've personally
used xpkMASH, which is as fast as NUKE and has better compression ratio. You
can expect an average gain of 50% or more.




================================================================================

The Story Behind It
-------------------

Everything started in 1991 (yes, more than 6 years ago ! In fact, with this
program, I think I beat the record of the most delayed production ever :).

At that time, I owned both an Atari ST and an Amiga, and was happily coding on
both of them. You certainly never saw many of my works, because I wasn't very
interested in coding and releasing whole demos, and was just interested in
finding the most optimized code for the fun ; I wrote some routines I was quite
proud of, such as my own ST hardware scroller in summer 1990 (and without
ripping anybody's code :), or also my own 4-pixel hardware scroller, and other
things like very fast packer/depacker. Only finished production I participated
to was the 'No Cooper' demo from my friends 1984 released in late 1991.

Although the Amiga hardware superiority was getting clearer and clearer
compared to the ST one, I thought that the ST really has very good 'synthetic'
songs with very good musicians such as Jochen Hippel. Then Jochen Hippel
started converting some tunes on Amiga (the first one I heard was 'Comic
Bakery' in a Hurricane Intro), and I thought "if ST musics sound quite nice on
Amiga, why not converting more of them ?". Since Jochen already converted his
own tunes, I decided to convert some Count Zero tunes (this was only some
months after the 'Decade Demo', and I thought Count Zero tunes were really
original and would provide great sound on Amiga).
I then dissassembled CZ replay, and reassembled it on Amiga, replacing each YM
acces by an access to the Amiga sound registers (with a 2 bytes sample, you can
play roughly the same sound as the ST by putting a per value of 14.3 * STper in
Amiga regs). My first emulator played one ST voice on one Amiga voice and used
the fourth Amiga voice to play white noise sample. Using a timer to emulate
volume variation (for enveloppes), this gave some really good results.
Unfortunately, converting other musics was quite tedious, since I had to
dissassemble and reassemble every music I wanted to emulate.
I then wrote a cleaner version, with a standalone YM2149 emulator. You just
needed to copy the values sent by the ST replay to the YM2149 in an emulator
buffer, and the emulator used these values to generate the correct sound. This
method is still used : to emulate a replay, you need to patch a few bytes to
copy registers values into the emulator buffer instead of accessing directly
the YM2149. This is much easier, 'cause once you've adapted (ie patched) one
tune, you can improve/debug the emulator without having to repatch the music.

After succesfully converting a few tunes, I decided to convert some more
difficult tunes : the ones from the Digi Department of the B.I.G. demo. Most of
these musics already existed for the Amiga Soundtracker, but I thought Mad Max
versions were really great and deserved being spread also on Amiga. This was
really hard work, because the ST used a base replay freq of approx. 10 kHz, but
the emulated sample frequence could be up to 135 kHz !! As the Amiga max
frequence is 'only' 28 kHz, I had to build several versions of the same sample
with oversampling to simulate higher frequencies (skipping one, two, three or
four bytes) and use heavy audio interrupts to smoothly chain the different
parts of the same sample when the frequency changed from 20 kHz to 120 kHz. In
fact, each sample is divided in small pieces, whose address is changed on every
VBL. Really tricky if you see what I try to explain, but I think the result is
really close to the original ST version (and with extra stereo effects!) ans
you shouldn't be able to heard transition between the many pieces of each
sample.

Since I then had a really similar Digital Department screen to the ST, I
decided to convert the whole B.I.G. demo as an homage to The Exceptions. As the
B.I.G. Demo wasn't very technical, it was quite easy to port it to the Amiga
(using the copper and the blitter, it was really easy in fact), and in summer
1993 I came up with a conversion after a few days (by the way you can start to
note that I dropped emulation coding for more than one year, this is just the
beginning ;). Then I converted more musics from other ST composers, but not on
a regular basis, just for fun from time to time. Then in summer 1995, I finally
decided to code also the sub screens of the B.I.G. Demo (yes, it now makes
three years that I started the conversion ...). I then put the final touch to
it in summer 1997.

Between 1992 and 1996, I collected a few tunes and converted them, but it
wasn't really significant. Then, in 1996, I had a few months of spare time
after succesfully "shortening" my military service and before starting to work
(I was then 23 years old). I then decided to completly recode the emulator to
support noise+copro mixing on the same Amiga voice with independant volume
enveloppe, without using a timer. The timers provide some quite precise
enveloppe generation, but it is much risky under the Amiga OS, since timer
could be used by the OS for keyboard, printer, ... So I coded some complete
mixing routines for noise and enveloppe, and added an easy support for samples
and SID env on any voice.

This new emulator was quite rapidly rewritten, and then I started collecting
tunes from all the games and demos I had ; in fact this is really what took me
many time, because of all the protections, packers and other routine I had to
cope with. But anyway, I now have quite an impressive list of tunes I think
(considering that I ripped nearly everything myself) and the result should be
good enough to bring back memories of all those great demos and games that
helped the ST in being one of the best computer of the 90'.

A final note about ripping music : believe it or not, but approximately 95 % of
all the musics I converted where ripped directly on Amiga. I use my own disk
routine (allows me to read any kind of ST disk format), and then decode/depack
everything on Amiga. This means that all music are saved in their original
state (I don't like the technique which consists in running the game, doing a
reset and then hunting for music in memory). Working on Amiga is really faster,
because I can store things on my HD and I have more RAM than my ST has (btw, my
poor config is a good old A500 with an SCSI HD and 3 Mb RAM). Of course
skipping demo protection was sometime really tough, but I've always managed in
finding the coding and packer used to extract the exact music data (without
extraneous garbage, such as pieces of font or gfx, as I've often seen in rip
from other (famous) people). I think ripping the musics on the disk rather than
in memory is the only way to obtain the cleanest data possible in exactly the
same state as they were composed by their author.



================================================================================

Technical Words
---------------

First, a few words on the YM2149 and its registers. This chip was build by
Yamaha and has existed under many other names (but the behaviour was always
slightly the same) ; apart from being used in the Atari ST, the same kind of
chip was used in the Amstrad CPC and the ZX Spectrum. It was also used in many
arcade machine in the 80's. For more infos on this, consult some specialized
soundchip site on the WEB or the Multi Arcade Machine Emulator (the great
M.A.M.E) pages to see the name of famous arcade machine using YM/AY chip.


Now let's go for the description of the chip, as it is used on the ST :
there're 14 registers (which are numbered from 0 to $D) for the sound and 2
registers ($E and $F) for the parallel ports and other device control (side
select on floppy drive, ...). So, you can forget reg $E and $F since they're
never used in any music replay (except in those replays that turned the drive
LEDs ON and OFF depending on the music being played ...).

Accessing the YM registers is a little different from accessing usual hardware
registers. You don't have directly access to the 16 regs, instead you must
select the register you want to access with a first write ("poke"), and then
you can write/read the value with a second poke or peek.

So, on ST, you have two registers :
 - a 8 bit control register at the address FFFF8800.
 - a 8 bit data register at the address FFFF8802.

To write into a reg, you should do this :
 - write the register index into FFFF8800
 - write the value into FFFF8802

To read a reg, do this:
 - write the register index into FFFF8800
 - read the current value from FFFF8800 (WARNING! read from 8800, not 8802)

Address FFFF8801 and FFFF8803 are useless, so you will often see the following
code to set a register value with one move.l :

    move.l    d0,$ff8800.w

with D0 bits 24-31 containing the register number and bits 8-15 containing the
value to write. Using the movem.l instruction, you can push this even further
and set all the registers with one instruction (see Hippel TFMX-COSO replay for
example).


Now, let's see the 14 registers (0 indicate unused bits):

    0    xxxxxxxx    PerA LO
    1    0000xxxx    PerA HI
    2    xxxxxxxx    PerB LO
    3    0000xxxx    PerB HI
    4    xxxxxxxx    PerC LO
    5    0000xxxx    PerC HI
    6    000xxxxx    PerNoise
    7    xxxxxxxx    InUse
    8    000Exxxx    VolA
    9    000Exxxx    VolB
    A    000Exxxx    VolC
    B    xxxxxxxx    PerEnv LO
    C    xxxxxxxx    PerEnv HI
    D    0000xxxx    Env Wave


The ST YM2149 used an internal clock at 150000 Hz.

Period is in big-endian order (that is LO then HI, instead of the Motorola
68xxx HI and LO order). So the sound frequency is CLOCK / Per, or also
CLOCK / ( PerHI*256 + PerLO ).

Reg 6 fixes the noise Per, it varies between 0 and $1F.

Reg 7 determines which voices are ON or OFF (this reg is 0 active, that is 0
means ON and 1 means OFF) :
    bit 0 : sound A      bit 1 : sound B     bit 2 : sound C
    bit 3 : noise A      bit 4 : noise B     bit 5 : noise C
    bit 6 and 7 are used to select the behaviour of reg $E and $F (input
        or output) ; you can ignore these bits and set them to 0.

For example, setting bit 0 and 3 to 0 will output sound+noise on voice A. Note
that even if all bits of reg 7 are set to 1 (OFF), you can still output sound
by setting the volume to 16 (Enveloppe ON). You will then obtain some kind of
"pure" "soft" env sound on that voice.

Reg 8, 9 and A select the volume from 0 (no sound) to $F (max vol). Bit 4 of
these regs is particular ; if you set if to 0, then the volume is constant and
determined by the bit 0-3. If you set it to 1, the volume is modulated with an
enveloppe, depending onthe Env Per (reg B and C) and the Env Wave (reg D). The
volume of one voice is the same for the sound and the noise output.

Reg B and C give the enveloppe period ; they work the same as reg 0 to 5.

Reg D choose the type of modulation. Only 4 bits are used, giving 16 different
waves, but in fact, only 8 different waves exist. The 4 bits specify the ADSR
(Attack, Decay, Substain, Release) behaviour of the env :

    0    \_____        go down, down

    1    \_____        go down, down

    2    \_____        go down, down

    3    \_____        go down, down

    4    /_____        go up, down

    5    /_____        go up, down

    6    /_____        go up, down

    7    /_____        go up, down

    8    \\\\\\        go down, go down

    9    \_____        go down, down

    A    \/\/\/        go down, go up    (Hippel's fave one)
         _____
    B    \        go down, up

    C    //////        go up, go up
         _____
    D    /        go up, up

    E    /\/\/\        go up, go down

    F    /_____        go up, down

In fact, only waves 8, 10, 12 and 14 give interesting sounds. All other waves
are rarely used (in some old replays). As you can see, only "saw tooth" like
waves are possible (whereas the C64 SID chip had square env also). Anyway,
square env can be emulated by software, using a timer to change the volume at
fixed intervals (see Scavenger, TAO or Big Alec musics for examples).


Concerning bits 6 and 7, you will often see replay which does this to set reg 7
to the value in D0 :
    move.b    #7,$ff8800.w
    move.b    $ff8800.w,d1
    and.b    #$C0,d1
    and.b    #$3F,d0
    or.b    d1,d0
    move.b    d0,$ff8802.w
This code is used to keep the value of bit 6 and 7. You can forget it under
MYST and should replace it with the following code (in your music's MasterPatch
section) :
    move.b    #7,$ff8800.w
    move.b    d0,$ff8802.w



The range of emulated frequencies is the following :
 - for "pure" sound (without noise), the samples used have a len varying
   between 2 and 256 bytes per VBL. Using many samples is better than using
   only one, because it helps in keeping the Amiga audio Per in a reasonable
   range (having a Per too high can cause problem when changing audio start
   address, since you must wait for the next audio DMA to come (this is the
   famous DMA pause problem on Amiga between switching audio OFF and ON)). The
   freq can be as high as 25000 Hz, which correspond to ST Per=10 (higher
   frequencies are hard to render with the Amiga).
 - noise sound can have all the ST values ; the frequency calculation is rather
   empirical, but it gives some good results.
 - enveloppes alone (thas is turning sound output OFF in reg 7 and setting
   volume to 16) are emulated in the range 10-4577 which corresponds to
   frequency from 54 to 25000 Hz. Practically, you will hardly see any replay
   with envper > 255 (so the 4577 max per is not really a limit in fact).


For all other sounds, some mixing is required. To obtain the best quality
possible, each voice uses a double buffer technique. Each buffer consists of
500 bytes per VBL, which is the maximum quality the OCS Amiga can produce.
Samples are always computed to give a final Amiga period always in the range
140 to 290 (between 12500 and 25000 Hz). The highest necessary frequency is
always choosen to get the best possible result. Note that the transition
between the buffers at each VBL can cause some strange sound if the frequency
has a big change ; this is due to the fact that I don't use audio inter under
the OS to perfectly synchronize the sample start with the period change (as I
used in the BIG demo Digi Dept) since using the OS audio inter with EP/DT
remove the possibility to use fine replay tuning (with timer). So, this is
unlikely to change, and if you notice this "beeps" (mainly with some SID env),
you will have to live with them :(  (I really think that the start/stop
mechanism of DMA Audio under Amiga is completly lame, but it's too late to
change it, so we'll have to use it this way).

The emulation process is I think pretty fast and special cares have been taken
to optimize the mixing routines (in the good old 'Try To Beat Dis' ST demo
tradition :) )

Here are some values for the mixing (in cycles ; remember that one A500 VBL
corresponds to 142000 cycles) :

 - misc calculation (in case no mixing are required) : less than 5000 cycles.
 - mixing noise + copro : 13300 cycles per voice
 - applying any YM enveloppe (register $D) : 32700 cycles per voice
 - applying SID enveloppe (that's an env with only two values) : 22500 cycles
   per voice

This means that even a music using three simultaneous env should run in one VBL
on a simple A500 (if there're no other tasks, of course). Most of the time,
musics only use one env and one noise+copro at a time, which means that most of
the musics will take only max 20-25% of the CPU or even less.


Note that sound+noise+env mixing is not supported at the moment (only used in
Prophecy by Big Alec), as well as noise+env with reg $D = 0-7, 9, B, D and F
(this kind of env are only used in very old replays (Bubble Bobble, Last
Trooper, ...) to provide slow volume variations, with a constant final volume).
These 2 mixings should be supported in the next release, since the code is 90%
done (I don't want to delay the first release of MYST any longer).



================================================================================

Bonus Screen
------------

As told at the beginning of this file, after coding my first soundchip
emulator, I decided to convert the B.I.G. Demo Digital Department. After
finishing it, I then thought "well, now that I'm having more and more files
converted as well as the Digi Dpt, what about coding a kind of intro/demo to
announce the YM2149 emulator ?". And, what best choice could there be to
introduce MYST than recoding the whole B.I.G. demo, since it was the first
really great musics collection on ST, with many of Rob Hubbard tunes converted.
Certainly one of the demo that stunned the most the ST demo community (along
with masterpieces like "The Union Demo" or "The Cuddly Demos", of course).

I'm sure I'm not the only one having spent hours listening to all the musics,
watching the "psych-o-screens", and reading the scrolling until the end to
discover explanations on "the border scrolling technique". Newcomers to the
demo scene will certainly not understand what this demo means with its simple
graphics and its kind of color cycling effects, but it really represents the
first real demo achievement on the ST and made "The Exceptions (TEX)" one of
the mythical group of the Atari ST.

It's now ten years ago, and what was first attempted as an homage is now
released for the 10th birthday of the B.I.G. demo (which was originally
released on 24 January 1988).
To ensure maximum respect of the demo, I've tried to match it as closely as
possible ; all colors, graphics, sounds and text are coming directly from the
demo. In fact, the most difficult part was to rip the colors and the exact
timings for all the rasters and color cycling. Really hard since the demo
itself is not really well coded in fact and uses some OS vectors as well as
some own interrupt ; quite messy in fact, but who really cares ?
Of course all the screens have been completly recoded with better optimized
code and also with Amiga hardware in mind, which means that everything knows
take less than 20 % of CPU (while some of the screens took 90% or more on ST).

I tried to match all the timings, so for example the musics list scroll at
exactly the same speed as on ST (the key repeat delay is the same as on ST).
Also the screen should be centered at exactly the same position, etc. I've also
emulated one of the B.I.G. demo famous bug which caused the screen 2 to have
rasters allways blue or always red (but never green...) on a random basis
(although the ST random function used the video beam position to create values,
it sometimes failed and returned always the same number !).

To run this demo, you will need 1 Mb of mem (at least 500 Kb of CHIP), so this
demo will work on an A500 with a 0.5 Mb memory extension.
You can escape it by pressing the left mouse button. You can also press RETURN
or SPACE to skip the loader screen. The demo is exactly the same (no different
scroll text), but you can press HELP to toggle ON or OFF a small VU-meter which
displays the state of the YM2149 emulator (I know this VU is not really nice.
It was used to debug, but I decided to leave it to allow people to see the
inner working of Mad Max (Jochen Hippel) very good conversions) ; also use your
mouse to move it.
There's no return to the OS possible, so after the reset part and the dark
screen, you will have to reboot your computer (sorry for that, but I don't have
time to track a small memory leak which sometimes completly crashes the
computer when returning to the OS ; I prefer a clean reset than an unstable OS
that could crash at any time).

Hope you will appreciate this homage as well as I enjoyed coding it.
And once again, special greetings to The Exceptions for all the great, great
job they made during these golden years of real demo spirit.



================================================================================

History
-------

 - Main v1.0 : first release on the NET. At least, after months of delays due
   to too much 'real' work, I finally succeded in putting a final point to the
   first release. The emulator can be considered as 95% complete (only missing
   effects are the sound+noise+env mixing and the 'constant' env).

 - Data 1 to 5 : a total of 934 songs are included in these archives. See the
   TuneHist.txt file for more details.



================================================================================

Acknowledgements
----------------

First of all, special general greetings to all the people who made this
collection possible : all the musicians, coders, graphists who worked hard on
games and demos and surely helped the Atari ST being the machine of the 90's
(with the Amiga of course). This was 68000 era, this was real fun coding and
computing, this was a time where games had gameplay (and not only full motion
video at 10 fps sequence), where coders did know how to code and used real
optimisation tricks to speedup things (no fucking useless MMX things was needed
to beat records), where graphists produced great images in 320x200 with only 16
colors, and where musicians created great musics with limited soundchip and a
few number of samples.
When I see today's computer world, dominated by the WinTel standard, I really
think that people who come to this market don't know what they've lost and what
great time they missed. Hopefully, not everything is dead. Emulators are
appearing around, coded by people who know what these computers represented and
who want to show the world what computing was like in that golden age ; also
some powerful game console like the Sony PSX are here, showing that PC's are
really not suited for real games (after the decline of ST/Amiga, I think the
PSX certainly was the first machine to make me say : "Woow, how cool it must be
to code on it ; this could give awesome demos").
So again, mega thanx to all the demo and games makers who made us dream during
years, pushing limits and exploiting the machine to its maximum.

For the personal greeting, they go to all 1984's members, that I know for many
years now ; we met around the ST, and now a long time after we still meet even
if ST and computers are not really here anymore. So thanks a lot, and thanks
for all the "positive" supports such as "an ST emulator on a dead computer such
as the Amiga, you're completly mad" or "you must be completly insane to collect
old automations CDs and rip MetroCross musics", etc.  Well ... thanks ;).

Also thanks to Grazey/PHF who send me many tunes from games. He contacted me
for some Custom modules I released for the Amiga and as I talked to him about
my ST project, he sent me a huge list of musics he already had collected. At
that time, I really thought I had 70 or 80 % of game musics, but when I saw
that his list was as big as mine, and that they share only few titles in
common, I understood that merging our files would give great results. Grazey
also beta tested many musics and versions of the player and also converted some
tunes to the YMST format.
 Hey Grazey, as you can see, this is finally released (after all those
"insults" like "you're the lazyest person on ST" or "are you trying to beat ST
Connexion and MCoder lazyness ?" ;-) , I would have liked to finish it sooner,
but my work really takes me many time and I don't always feel like converting
ST tunes after a full day of work ;)

With the release of the Pacifist emulator on the wrong machine (once a time,
the wrong machine meant the Amiga, now try to guess what it is ...), many WEB
sites are opening on the Net. I can't name them all, but I send a special HI!
to all those ST addicts for the great memories they bring (Hi to Rich Davey
'Little Green Desktop', to Flix demo's page (with a screenshot from the
NoCooper :) and to Knaus/Aura for his sound page (hey, what about dropping your
SNDH format and switching to YMST ? Much modular I can assure you, and you
wouldn't have to disassemble/reassemble every music)).



================================================================================

Contact Address
---------------

Want to get in touch, have any remarks or bug to report, any music you would
like to see included ? Only one way to contact me : send an e-mail to Nicolas
Pomarede (that's me) at the following address (please no binary without warning
me first) :

    [e-mail]

I will answer all messages, but please be patient, as I don't have all the time
I'd like for it.







Well, This is all for now. See you all in the next releases with more tunes
to add to your collection.

Bye

                        Nicolas / Mr.Styckx