SlowTracker is Slowly Improving (Patreon)

With the recent progress on synthesizer boards, it's time to resume software development. I've honestly meant to do this for awhile... In the past I did do co-working jams with some of my creative friends, but one of them has been dealing with personal issues recently and the other moved away. 

Anyway, today's post is about the quest to actually get sound out of this tracker. That requires a lot of work... but with the driver work done on the soundboards I decided I would get hotplug into the tracker. It detects new boards and creates a thing to control the board from the tracker now. Still no beeps or boops or note-to-board virtualization but that will come. Unplugging of boards is not properly detected but failure is graceful and the tracker does not crash.

If you like "screenshot-watching" for features, you'll see that I have channel numbering and next to each channel number is which board the channel is assigned to. This will allow me to redirect a channel to a different soundchip or channel, possibly even in realtime (once I write the code, that is. Right now they just say NONE but soon picture something like "2>6581:3" to designate tracker channel 2 is getting sent to channel 3 on the SID.

You'll also notice I've implemented some lines between channels for readability and added coloring into the font rendering with a dash of it in the interface. The order list now has a highlight block to show you which channel you're in. No editing there yet but I'm slowly getting ideas. 

Speaking of pattern order, I decided to go with the "channel-ordering" style of order similar to famitracker and deflemask, rather than the "pattern-ordering" style which might be familiar to MOD/S3M/XM/IT crowd. I recently shouted out looking for other ideas to extend or improve upon this (thanks if you participated in the discussion!) and several people also pointed out the "piano roll" and "drum machine" styles of order representation. I'm not really interested in those, but if you have any thoughts on how pattern order is not intuitive, I'm eager to hear you out!

Once this tracker can make some noise, I'll be sure to post an update with the tracker playing some tunes through a new chip I got working...the TIA!