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'ere we go: https://github.com/utz82/bintracker/releases/latest
Just a bunch of bugfixes for now. I might do another bugfix release shortly but I'm afraid I won't get around to implementing any major new features before the end of the year, unfortunately.

Ok guys, per popular demand™ I've swapped Ctrl+V/Ctrl+P in trunk
gtap, are you on Linux or do you need a Windows build with this change?

Cheers gtap, glad you enjoy the ride so far

Yeah, unfortunately the fxtables are not very convenient/user friendly at the moment. My plan is to improve the situation with the next MDAL standard. The idea is that there'll be seperate tables for notes, dutys, etc. on the front end, and libmdal will generate the actual data tables from those input tables. Still got quite some work left on that, though.

This is on the to-do list, not just for the current block but even for the current row. However, it's not so easy to implement. For "normal" chip editors it's fairly easy because you can determine the current playback position simply by counting the vblank interrupts that have occured. However, for 1-bit this isn't possible because in most engines, there are no interrupts.

Good one, haven't thought of that before.

Do you think ctrl-v and ctrl-p should be swapped? I thought that having ctrl-v insert and shift the stuff after the cursor would be more intuitive. But I'm open to suggestions here, in any case.

This would be quite difficult to implement as such, because internally, modifiers don't exist as a seperate entity. However, I see your point and I'll try to find a solution/workaround. Need to dig into the code for the modifiers anyway because there's this problem that heoretically you should be able to enter modifiers without an associated note value, but it doesn't work

Not sure I understand the question, but have you filled all 4 positions on the current row of the sequence? If you have gaps in the sequence, like this:

00 01 -- --
02 -- -- --

there will be random notes and effects.

Yes, that's the idea - except it's not a sample, it's generated in realtime!

Anyway, getting closer to a two-channel implementation. Still need to get rid of some 20 t's of overhead, though.
Ultimately it'd be great to come up with a more efficient way of implementing this, because even just some simple additonal modifications of the delay line can go a long way with this algorithm. Also, using a non-random source (for example a square wave) can produce some great result as well, but again takes too much time with my current implementation.

Edit: Probably the way to go forward is to render at a lower rate. Did some tests with rendering at 7812.5 Hz, it sounds not too bad (and will give more flexibility I hope) - see test2.tap.

After seeing this, I was curious if this type of physical modelling could be made to work on beeper.
Well... I guess it can. Voilà, a real-time synthesized string instrument on beeper
This is only a single channel implementation, but there are 79 cycles wasted, so hopefully 2 channels of this will be doable. Another problem is that right now this works only with 8-bit dividers. It would theoretically be possible to go up to 9 or 10 bits, but this would cost a lot of cycles.

Need your help again Could you run

glxinfo | grep OpenGL

on the machine that has this problem, and post the output?

I realize now that this is a much more significant problem than I thought. The problem is this: When you save a song in bintracker, it will iterate over the existing blocks (patterns/tables/etc) and save all of them to the file, whether they are used or not. However, when you load that file back into bintracker, MDAL does the parsing, and MDAL determines the block type from the usage context, which means for blocks that aren't referenced either in the sequence or by a command, the block type cannot be determined. So consequently those non-referenced blocks will be ignored, and will be lost the next time you save your song.

This is something that needs to be addressed in the upcoming new MDAL version 2 standard, but I haven't found a good solution to the problem yet. Actually in MDAL2 things will be worse, since there will be a new abstraction layer between user input and data output. Eg. right now, an input block is directly converted into an output block, but in MDAL2 this will be different. There will be abstract "input blocks" which are then converted into "output blocks" in multiple ways. Take for example PhaseSqueek: Right now, writing FxTables is very inconvenient, because the entire set of commands is affected. With the new abstraction layer, you will be able to write seperate tables for each channel or maybe even each command, and MDAL will take care of merging them into the actual FxTable blocks. tl;dr, we'll see a lot more different blocktypes in MDAL2.

So, as I said, I'm still looking for a solution for this problem, and I'd very much appreciate some input on this issue. Right now I'm leaning towards
requiring MDAL block names to be prefixed with the input blocktype name, eg. instead of ":pattern1", you'd write something like "PATTERNS:pattern1". Probably even go further and ditch pattern names (can you imagine writing a sequence for ZX-16 using pattern names?), so the new syntax would be something like "PATTERNS:01". (Actual pattern names would be implemented as a command, in this case.) However, this could get rather messy and unintuitive for users, considering that there might be a large number of input block types, and implementations will vary quite a bit depending on the engine. Eg. in ZX-16, there should be one single input blocktype (called eg. PATTERNS, containing one NOTE command and one SLIDE command), which can be used for each of the 16 channels. In engines with channels that have different capabilities (think Phaser1 for example), there could be different input blocktypes for each channel. So then we'd have "PATTERNS_CH1:xx", "PATTERNS_CH2:xx", and so forth - not exactly user-friendly imo. On the other hand, it'd be easier to avoid namespace clashes that way, which is actually a thing in MDAL1: It's perfectly legal to give the same name to a pattern and an non-pattern block, and theoretically the parser should magically figure out which is which, which doesn't happen of course.

Another solution would be to generate a list of unused blocks for each blocktype when saving a module. However, as mentioned before, I believe named patterns should probably go, because there are several problems with them.

Version 0.1.1 is ready, btw. Mostly bugfixes in this one. Also the aforementioned alternate method of selecting items from dropdown lists, and a feature to randomize a selection of a pattern/table (mostly useless I guess, but I needed an RNG in the tracker so why not use it for this as well).

Now waaaaait a minute. I see (hear) your point regarding the drums (and yes, it's a Codemasters title) - but there's no way this is LSengine, because the tones sound totally different. The characteristic whistle of the squares makes me almost certain that it's WHAM. So could it be that somebody hacked in the drums from LSengine into WHAM? Only one way to find out... Archive.org has a .z80, so let's take a look. Hmm, it's not the exact code from WHAM, but there are some pretty striking similarities... Exiting stuff, and well spotted introspec

Hi Catmeows,

2) is indeed just monophonic arps.
3) is almost certainly Mark Alexander's driver (WHAM! The Music Box).
1) seems to be monophonic arps as well, but with a dedicated, pretty sophisticated driver. Not sure about this one, maybe others know more.

Great find, Tufty! I'm too stupid to play the game but... Walk like an Egyptionnnnnnn!