[cc65] Is an abc-driver acceptable?

Hi,

Now after getting a bit familiar with the tgi and joy drivers I would like
to write a small abc-driver to take care of melodies and sound effects.

The abc would be an implementation of abc-music notation with some small
additions.

This driver requires some kind of mechanism for maintaining a sound
waveform without CPU support. The Lynx has a timer, a shift register and a
xor-gate that is good enough for this purpose. I hope the other targets have
something similar or better.

The calls I planned to use are

 - abc_instrument( channel, instrument );

 - abc_tempo( channel, tempo );

 - abc_volume( channel, volume );

 - abc_play_tune( channel, tune );

 - abc_update();

where channel = 0..n number of separate melodies the hardware can
play simultaneously.

tune = "CCCE DDDG FFEE 4D"; A melody where notes are described in ASCII
letters.

abc_update(void); is called frequently (perhaps once per graphics frame)
to keep the music going.

Every target should also create some defines that makes setting up good
instruments easier like:

#define ABC_FLUTE 1
#define ABC_DRUM  2
#define ABC_EXPLOSION 3
...

These could then be used by the programmer like:

abc_instrument(0, ABC_FLUTE);
abc_play_tune(0, "CDEFGAB5c");
abc_instrument(1, ABC_DRUM);
abc_play_tune(1, "C3zC3zcccc");
while (1) {
    usleep(100ms);
    abc_update();
}

I know that this is quite far from any ANSI standards etc. But I have
used abc-notation in several Lynx games already and I like it.

Besides, if someone wants to create another sound driver you could then
just create a different set of drivers for it like mid_* for a midi driver
or smp_* for digitized samples. Or whatever...

Comments? Would this be a good addition to our set of drivers? Or should I
keep this to myself.

--
Cheers,

Karri

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