Beepola 1.07.00 Released

A new version of Beepoa, v1.07, is now available for download from:-

http://freestuff.grok.co.uk/beepola/ (1.63MB zipped exe, no installer required).

New things include:-
* The Music Box (Wham!) engine now supports drums/white noise. So finally utz has the gabber kick he's been asking for for the past 3 years

* New engine: ROMBeep. This was included in v1.06 as a compile-only option; it's now been added fully into the editor. It's fairly uninspiring, but it does have the advantage of being able to run from contended memory (so will work on a 16K speccy).

* New engine: Plip Plop. Something I've been hoping to add for a while as it was pretty ground-breaking in its day. A single channel, with pitch bend, and 4 drums. Written originally by Joff and subsequently modified/maintained by Paulie at Ocean/Imagine, it can be heard in Konami Pong, Cobra, Renegade 3 and many other Ocean & Imagine titles. A massive thanks to Paulie Hughes for kindly sending me the source code for this engine from Cobra (about 2 years ago - I've been sitting on it for a while ). I'd never have got around to implementing this without his input.

* New engine: Huby. Another great engine by Shiru. 2 channels, with a single drum effect that can replace the note on channel1. This one sounds, to me, quite similar to the engine used by Odin in Heartland and Robin of the Wood. It has the advantage of being tiny (a shade over 100 bytes for the player code, depending on the options selected) so would be great for use in games. Beepola has a smart compressor for this engine that I'm very pleased with -- it scans the music data looking for groups of notes and effectively reduces Huby tune data down the smallest size mathematically possible without altering the sound. It's perfectly possible to do a neat-sounding 2 channel tune in 200 bytes using this engine.

* Improvements to the Song Ripper. It'll now rip tunes from TAP or Z80 files in the following formats: The Music Box (orignal speccy version and Beepola-compiled), Phaser1 (Shiru's original linear player and Beepola-compiled), The Music Studio (Beepola implementation), and Special FX (Beepola implementation). It still needs some work, but it's getting there slowly...

* I've moved all of the demo songs that were previously included in the zip file into a separate online section, linked to from a startup dialog in Beepola and also available from Help menu (Help->Beepola Showcase...). The zip file is growing in size and it seems to make more sense to make the tunes available online individually to those who want them rather than blindly including them all in the distribution zip file.

I've also made a number of optimisations and generally tried to tidy up the mess a bit...

This version is built with a new toolchain, and is internally quite a bit different to the previous release. So expect some (hopefully minor!) bugs. Please let me know if you find anything awry so I can fix ASAP.

Thanks to everyone who made suggestions and bug reports in the 3 years since the last release of Beepola.

Cheers,
Chris.