Demand for a Native Sega Genesis/Megadrive FM Tracker/Sequencer. (Page 2 of 9)

Fun fact - most of the Sonic the Hedgehog hacking community does this not because tools don't exist, but because almost everyone is stupid and elitist. It's painful to watch, I used to do music this way. If you haven't pushed Deflemask at www.sonicretro.org, you should. They need to "see the light."

Didn't some dude on there do a HD remake of sonic 2 and add DRM to it?

I'm happy to see that it seems like a lot of people are definitely interested in this. I'm seeing some good ideas being chimed in as well.

I'm curious as to whether or not it's feasible to port the code responsible for the handling of the FM synths in one of the pc Genesis trackers to the Genesis itself. It would speed up the development of this tracker immensely, because in my opinion, coding the synths would be the most challenging and time consuming part, then again it may be a necessary evil.

Also, is anybody interested in helping out with the graphical UI? I could do it myself sure, but I know there's people out there more talented than I am with graphics. I was PM'd one offer for help so far.

Keep the ideas coming guys, I'm liking what I'm seeing.

Last edited by CountSymphoniC (Nov 16, 2012 10:16 pm)

My nipples are seriously hard in anticipation.

Genesis composer reporting:

I've used both Deflemask and TFM/ VGM to compose, but what's more important to me right now is the live element.
As of right now, live Genesis is very plug-and-play... there really isn't room for improvisation or alteration once it's one the cart.
What I'd like to see is an interface that controls the operators.

Picture a tracker where you program most of the instruments and the melodic parameters via computer, but allows you to use the Genesis controllers to change ADSR, Multiplicity, algorithms, tempo, pattern lists in a live setting. That's what I think is more important to opening up doors.

$.02

A couple of things.

First, I'm thinking there should be a basic and an advanced control scheme. To accommodate the 3 button and 6 button genesis controllers respectively. Not everyone is going to use this tracker with a Nomad, and not everyone is going to use it with a 3 or 6 button either/or. I believe that the needs of nearly everyone should be taken into consideration with the development of this tracker.

Secondly, seeing as how there really isn't a "select" button, and "mode" seems kinda iffy to use in it's place... in the case of using an "LSDJ" inspired interface, the "C" button should be assigned.

Either way, I've learned from the mistakes of many app and game developers... it's unreasonably inconvenient to not allow user customization of the program's control scheme. So this is a feature I would like to implement.

It looks like it's time to start getting a list down of tracker features, there's many great ideas coming forth. Most everyone here seems to agree on the "LSDJ" style interface, so I'm going to get into contact with Johan about this. It may also be possible to create multiple UI's, with which the user may choose one of their preference.

Lazerbeat, could you point me to YM2612 docs that are accurate? Btw, I'm a heavy user of tables in LSDJ. There's no way I would do an "LSDJ" styled tracker without the tables. Same with live mode.

Last edited by CountSymphoniC (Nov 17, 2012 3:47 am)

If this gets finished, I am willing to bet 95 percent of users are nomad users!

Awesome, piggy tracker does this rather well through a nice little .xml file

Im not 100 percent sure there is accurate documentation. If memory serves, the issue is the algorithms shown in the documentation switch operators 2 and 3. So algo 0 is listed as

1 - 2 - 3 - 4

but its actually

1 - 3 - 2 - 4

This doesnt really make any difference for algo 7 or algo 5 but for the others its a major issue. I THINK that is correct, once you get that far into development I will dig out some of my old notes and fire up my megadrive and check!