Re: The MOD player (Was: Re: [AL] New WIP)

[Andrei 'o. b. E. <el...@xs...>]

Shawn Hargreaves wrote:

>>Also, does it have the ability to let the program check the status of
>>each voice so that you can make VU meters for each voice, and does it
>>let you get info on other MOD-effects that happen?
> 
> Not directly, although I'm sure you could poke around in the internals
> of the player and grab at least some of that info. But surely such
> things are only useful for writing a fancy graphical player, which isn't
> what most people are going to be doing with Allegro...

Although game coders might not find much use for this, Demo coders would find
this extremely useful. At leat voice-based VU meters are a lot less CPU
intensive than having a spectrum analyser. One MOD player I downloaded for
Windows95 (ModPlug Player) has this option (which eats CPU time), but has no
voice-based VU meter. For a MOD palyer, this is sacreligious :-(

>>Here's an idea for someone with waaaaaaayy too much time on their hands.
>>Why not make an add-on package that emulates the soundchips of ancient
>>computers (eg. The Atari's Pokey, the C64's SID, the ST's YM2149, etc).
> 
> "Way too much time" is certainly the right term!
> 
> Although, there are a _lot_ of emulators around that use djgpp, and
> several also make use of Allegro routines. I'm sure the authors would be
> very interested in a package that emulated the sound hardware for
> them...

There are already several such packages around. It would just be a question of
getting them to work with DJGPP/Allegro. I've got the complete sourcecode for
a POKEY emulator (the soundchip of the Arari 8-bit). Unfortunately, I don't
know enough about sound interrupt programming to try and get it to work, but
in the future, I may give it a go, but I've got too much to do at the mo'. The
emulator is written entirely in C, but as it's designed to compile as a 16-bit
application as well as a 32-bit application, this may mean that it was written
for real mode. The emulator uses the "SBDRV Sound Blaster Driver Library V1.0"
for playing the sound.

Another useful feature for the MOD player would be for you to be able to get
feedback on which part of the MOD it's palying and dynamically change the
sequence of patterns depending on what the player is currently doing. This
would enable you to compose an interactive dynamic soundtrack that changed
smoothly (ie. when the existing sequence of patterns has finished playing, the
MOD player plays the sequence according to the state of the program).

AE.

-- 
Andrei Ellman - URL: http://www.xs4all.nl/~ellman/ae-a - ae...@yo...
"All I wanna do is have some fun     :-)     || ae...@mi...
 I've got the feeling I'm not the only one"  || mailto:el...@xs...
     -- Sheryl Crow      :-)    ||       It's what you make of it.