Chipmusic was being written before there was a 'scene', and it'll carry on being written after this 'scene' has gone. (let's be honest it's kind of died off here at least in the last year or so) It's like the demoscene in that respect, somebody is going to be writing stuff because they HAVE to write stuff regardless of there being an audience.
The 'video game reference' problem. Well, it's 2015 and I still see a lot of chip gig flyers with Street Fighter characters on, or gameboys, or pixel fonts so... well... if we stop doing it ourselves that'll probably help at least. Chipmusic isn't some weird thing with it's own rules, you can play it on your stereo now instead of some esoteric old hardware. At that point it's music like any other music. You wouldn't have a metal gig poster with a picture of a guitar on it, give your audience some credit. Just write music, stop saying how you write it, and what with, at least it's better than hiding behind (for want of a better word) a 'gimmick'. You know what's good? Seeing a music playlist full of lots of bands (including chipmusic) , much better than seeing a separate playlist for chipmusic at least. At least for 'pure' chipmusic that should really be the goal personally.
If you've used another tracker (like Protracker / Famitracker) the composition side should be fairly easy to get into. I can understand people getting a bit confused with the table side, personally I prefer the 1.x series of GoatTracker though 2.x is a lot more flexible. With 1.x you have waveforms/pitch/arpeggio within the same table structure which makes things more readable.
Failing that I'd recommend John Player as another tracker with a familiar interface, though that only runs on the machine itself.
Ice Wolf : which version are you using? there was a keycode fix in 2.71 though it doesn't say what it fixed. For some tools I've had to change Windows to a different keyset (eg: in FastTracker2 under Dosbox I'm using a US keyboard to get the ALT Gr key to work) though I wouldn't think that'll help in this case.
Well there are at least 70 songs in the HVSC written with it, so someone's using it. Anyway c64 stuff in general in the chip scene has always been a small userbase, not to mention that underpowered MSSIAH thingy is inexplicably popular.
Hang on, how are you recording it? You have to have Record & Play buttons running in Milkytracker to have the track run, not just the Rec button Otherwise how would it know where the rests are in the melody?
Thanks, just downloaded it. Amusingly I can see the I/O registers updating real-time but can't seem to save a log for those. It has source though so that's worth a look, cheers.
Had a quick wander through a few GB/NES emulators this morning. Has anyone managed to get a sound register log out of any of the existing emulators? (just a basic address/data trace while code is running) I was going to have a peek through MESS but if anyone has already done this let us know, cheers. Got a couple of sound register streaming ideas.
I'm not sure trackers have much to do with it, we had trackers in the '80s. It comes down to how much people can be bothered to play around with instruments (see the ton of Future Composer or Sound Monitor tracks with the same arps), or diverge from the standard "hard-restart" stuff that was popular in the late '90s. As with real music you do get a 'glut' of similar tracks for a couple of years. (if there was a popular demo in one style you'll find a lot of music in that style too. See the Drax/Dane clones when Krestology arrived or all the tech tracks when the Polish scene was knocking out demos) But there were plenty of people doing wild stuff in that era. Mid-'90s was when the c64 demoscene started kicking back into gear again when the OCS Amiga stuff was fading out.
Off the top of my head, looking at that era if you want really varied sounds go listen to Ed, BluesMuz/Kjell Nordbo, PVCF.
Speaking of editors, each has it's own weird quirks and trying to do the same instruments in two different editors can yield wildly different results. When trackers moved mostly to table-based instruments it got a bit easier to do identical sounds, but there are still differences because the SID is a quirky piece of kit. Which order registers are triggered in, how fixed notes or portamento is implemented and so on. If you're really bored run SIDid on the HVSC and see what editors were popular. I tried it a while back and got this:
Well it has an AY chip in but probably best to ask Factor6 or somebody like that. I've always done AY stuff on PC because I'm not keen on the GUIs in the native tools I've tried, and the emulation isn't really far off these days. One thing I will say though is download a Spectrum emulator to try some things out, not necessarily for trying out the tools but just how a Spectrum works in general. ZXSpin, for example, is a good one for trying out all the hardware configs and has a tape browser built-in. Though most emulators support all available hardware.
There were disc drives as well, and microdrives. these days a lot of people have a divide or similar. (or use an app to play tape files into their spectrums via the headphone jack, there are a few of those) btw you do know there are various types of Spectrum yeah? (48k (no AY without interface), 128k, +2, +3, various clones)
Are you talking about AY or Beeper music? I don't know how many trackers actually support tapes, the ones I tried out were all disk back in the day. The old Soundtracker (for AY) at least works, and something like 'Wham The Music Box'. (for Beeper) Either way they're very old, probably Factor6 or somebody would know newer ones. On PC I'd recommend Vortex Tracker.
