Re: [cc65] abc music specification

On Wed, 22 Dec 2004, Groepaz wrote:
> to make it short, i'm not quite sure if such a generic player is worth the effort.
> it will be very bulky, huge, slow and sound mid-quality at best. plus it will be
> next to impossible to find someone to compuse tunes for you, unless you write
> a decent editor too :=P

Wrong. There is several decent editors already. I have a few thousand
tunes in this format already that I downloaded from the net. And there is
conversion programs freely available to convert form midi and other
formats.

Plus it is not bulky, slow or anything related to that. My version for the
Lynx using 4 simultaneous channels as taken from my map-file is:

abcmusic.o:
    CODE              Offs = 000A0D   Size = 00046D
    RODATA            Offs = 00002C   Size = 00003D
    DATA              Offs = 00006D   Size = 00003E

And this is lousy code as I am a lousy assembler coder.

In the hands of a capable coder it could probably drop in half.

> imho this needs to be discussed a lot, needs comments from the atari and apple ppl

Hard to argue with this comment...

> tjam, a thing that would be entire possible, and much easier to define and implement would
> be a driver to play samples though...maybe we should start with that. (i might be able to
> contribute a modded version of SAM *cough* :=P)

This is a different thing that is also needed. The Lynx hardware can be
set up
1) to support samples be giving access to a D/A circuit directly
2) or to control oscillators and shift registers for producing the sound.

I feel that samples should provide a different set of drivers to do the job.
The alternative 1 costs CPU-time while alternative 2 is virtually free. So
for calculation intensive games I prefer alternative 2.

So I vote for keeping a music player driver separate from a sample player.
And I would also like to see both drivers available on the cc65 compiler.

--
Merry Xmas to all,

Karri
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