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1993-03-14
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4KB
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96 lines
PT-PLAYER version 1.02
----------------------
(official version)
A Protracker Module-Player for Atari ST (released 24/02/1993)
Coded by Petri Kuittinen (alias The Eye of Brainwash Company!)
Play routine by Martin Griffiths (Griff of EI)
General
-------
This program is freeware. It means you can copy and use it freely as
long as this file and all the other files related to this program are
copied with it and remain unchanged. Donations are of course always
welcome (I'm a poor student). ;-)
This is program is supposed to play Noise- and Protracker module
files via Yamaha-2149 sound chip. The sound output is 17.1 Khz
mono PCM sound with 11 bits linear dynamics. This program works on all
resolutions and on all screen refresh rates. It works on all
Atari ST/STE models (with only 0.5 Mb RAM you might have trouble playing
very large mods). It hopefully works on Atari Falcon and TT too
(I don't have any machine to test with) if you turn the cache off
(the player uses self-modifying code!).
History
-------
I was fed up using the current crap mod-players which existed for Atari
ST. All of them had at least few of the following faults:
-poor sound quality (noisy, only 8 bits dynamics)
-no real time volume variation
-protracker effects don't play correctly/at all
-only work on low or med. resolution and under 50 Hz screen refresh rate
-lock up with Midi-data (or even keyboard data!)
To correct the situation I spent few hours coding a small GEM front
end (actually my first GEM prg!) and combined it with Griff's magnificent
play routine. It took me many hours to to fix few bugs in it and to
get it work independent of screen refresh rate. Griff's play routine
uses the original Amiga PT-player source, so it really plays all the
effects correctly, except filter setups (there is no filters in ST!)
and CIA tempo values (I have fixed the code to approximate the
tempo value with the nearest speed value. This is not a perfect
solution).
Manual
------
Pt-player is very easy to use. Just start the program and after
that a dialog box, with the title 'PT-PLAYER v1.02', should appear on
the screen. Pressing left mouse button on the title bar will show the
credits. Below that reads the status (normally 'Waiting for selection')
and below that is the module name. If there is no module in memory,
name is a sequence of lines ('---------'). There are three buttons
in the bottom of the dialog box: LOAD, PLAY and EXIT. LOAD will
load a module-file to memory using standard GEM file selector.
Program will warn you with alert boxes if you try to load a file
which is not NT/PT mod-file. Pressing PLAY with left mouse button will
start playing a module if there is one in memory. The play routine takes
nearly all processor time on standard Atari ST. No other action
is possible while playing. Pressing space bar will stop playing.
Pressing EXIT will exit program.
Disclaimer
----------
Use this program at your own risk. The author has no responsibility what
so ever to the possible damage caused by this program.
Greetings go to
---------------
-Electronic Images (Hi Griff and Count Zero!)
-The Exceptions (Mad Max and ES, sorry about the big confusion I have
caused. I was fooled by some jerks in Irc. Real Mad Max and ES have
NEVER joined The Brainwash Company.)
-friends at school: then, hmallat and owl.
-Marinos Yannikos (Zork of SOTE)
-Delta Force (Yo Newmode, Slime, Hackbear, Karl_m and Wizzcat!)
-Irc friends at #atari
-Great mod-composers: Captain, Dr. Awesome, Tip, Firefox, Mantronix,
Uncle Tom, 4mat, Walkman, Romeo Knight and Jesper Kyd.
Contact the author for ideas, bug reports, demo stuff etc. via
--------------------------------------------------------------
Electronic mail: eye@niksula.cs.hut.fi (internet)
Ordinary mail: Petri Kuittinen
Timpurinkuja 1 C 39
SF-02600 Espoo
FINLAND