SlowTracker becomes CTM, synth update (Patreon)

After a whole lot of behind-the-scenes background under-the-hood nonsense, not to mention the year known as 2017, ice is back with my brand new invention.

Okay, clearly this is the same old invention, but progress has been made. Back in my "tale of two chippies" post I showed off that I had worked on more synthesizer boards, namely an Atari 2600 board (pictured here in Ghostbusters Green) and a YM2149 board. And prior to that you could see my kiddie keyboard test app that I wrote to test the SID.

I guess the most important thing is that the tracker has been renamed. It's called CTM, named for one of my other comfort foods that isn't pizza: Chicken Tikka Masala. I'm thinking Chippin' Tracker Masala? Something like that. Anyway, boards now light green when initialized so that you know the tracker has detected them and placed them in the equipment list. They also go dark when the tracker exits. These are honestly just niceties; the real news is that hotplug was just a tad broken when I implemented it last year. Not only is hotplug more robust, the channel assignment thing and some other updates went in. Slightly related: Here's a new screenshot:

New additions are the pattern editor is a basic picture of most things I want from a pattern editor, and you can see the "pattern matrix" type thing which is now much cleaner, has scrolling, clearly-defined edit buttons, and the most important part: all of that works!

There have been a reasonable pile of updates to the UI, more hotkeys, almost everything is clickable, it's starting to feel like a usable app. I'm pushing updates to a private git repository to keep offsite backups and track all of the new features. 

Even though I still need to get sound coming out of the boards, a sizable framework (including bare register writes to the boards) now exists to define what boards are capable of so that the tracker can push data to the board. There are functions to set the volume, and in theory they work. I'm getting preeeeeetttttttty close to that "glue it all together" stage where I can be like "oh, there is some data, let's hear what that sounds like".

Of course, then I'll need a file format....well, we'll get there.

Anyway, this is a very exciting time for the synth. Patrons can watch commits and ask questions about it in #tech on my discord!