CTM 0.0.6 - a better result, and why (Patreon)

Shoutouts to Phoenix and Mem O'Ree! What we have here is CTM, my tracker, playing the first song out of the incredible PC demo 8088 MPH. The original song is called Sleeping Waste and is a damn fine piece of MOD music written in 1994. The version you hear here is arranged by Phoenix who also wrote a pretty great demo called Abort Retry Fail back in the day....in QuickBasic.

So what's new with CTM? Well, the bigguns are that it supports XM, which is basically my favorite tracker format in the whole wide world, and as a cooldown from writing XM support I also implemented MON support which is MONOTONE's native format. Why MON? A few reasons really; MON is for the PC Speaker and lesser sound configurations for the PC, and I thought the songs would translate nicely to the synth. Turns out I was right - that song sounds pretty good, no?

Other updates to CTM involve a few cleanups; somewhere along the way CTM started slowing down and I need to look into it, but it made me realise I hadn't implemented all of my font shortcuts that I intended to, so I dropped some of those in, and things are still chugging along smoothly. I also implemented import support for basically every type of specifically-MOD that I know about (that is, not MOD-derivatives like S3M -- which I can detect, at least -- or IT, but programs that did hacks to save 14-channel MODs and the like). I prepared the instrument handler to handle samples and even multisamples (a la FT2) because it was easier than ignoring the data, and I intend to do cool stuff with it later. And last but not least I added mousewheel support in the pattern area and fixed a little bug where I could accidentally click on the channel reassignment boxes when they weren't active.

In hardware land, I've had help from fellow chiptune scene guy ImATrackMan on designing a package converter for my YM2608 (OPNA) so that I can use it with my synthesizer, and I've designed two of them myself so I can adapt Namco N163 and Narrow DIP like the YM2413 and SN76489. This will contribute to the cool array of sounds the tracker and synthesizer will be able to create, and even do research (more on that later)!

Things are shaping up! I really can't do this without you all supporting me, and I want you to know I appreciate it. We can actually hear real music coming from the tracker+synth now! Thank you!

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