Vortex Tracker

Post by **Dbug** » Sat Sep 29, 2007 8:17 pm

If you people are willing to try on doing YM music for Oric demos or games, please take a look at the vortex tracker:
http://bulba.at.kz/vortex_e.htm

It's a Windows program, mostly aimed at MSX/Sinclair machines, but it can exports in many formats, is able to load a large library of existing musics and sounds.

Since we are having trouble finding people doing music for us, perhaps this program could help.

I'm currently trying to see if I can get a working replayer for the PT3 format, stay tuned

JamesD · Post by **JamesD** » Sun Sep 30, 2007 12:01 am

I think that's the best way to go but the only 6502 tracker source (player) I could find was Vic Traker. I know Z80 source is out there that could be translated... I have a printout somewhere around here.

JamesD · Post by **JamesD** » Sun Sep 30, 2007 12:33 am

I just found RMT - Music Tracker for Atari
http://raster.infos.cz/atari/rmt/rmt.htm

carlsson · Post by **carlsson** » Tue Oct 23, 2007 1:09 pm

Hm, are you looking for trackers and music programs that 1) run on any native platform and 2) have full source code available? I think there may be one or two C64 trackers that fill these needs, but they're pointless to you with an AY chip. The tracker Dbug posted about could be interesting.

Twilighte · Post by **Twilighte** » Tue Feb 10, 2009 9:03 pm

Their is alot of mention about vortex tracker in AYT thread and have suggested it move to a different thread, like here

Anyway, i do remember something very neat about Vortex compiled tunes was that to further save bytes, the Ornaments, Volumes and Effects would only be specified in a note event if they differed from the last. This simple rule cuts out so much wasted memory

So the Vortex format goes by the idea that all information (about the note about to be played in the pattern) is provided prior to the note being specified, since the note itself is the final byte before it is played.
So a typical pattern might contain..

Effect 01
Ornament 03
Volume 10
Note C-4
Rest 3 rows
Ornament 02
Note C-4

Because no Effect or Volume was specified in the second note it would be taken from the previous so the second note would play Effect 01 and Volume 10.
btw, i implemented this into the AYT compiler

Chema, if you manage to work out the proper Vortex PT3 format, please doc here or somewhere and let me have them, then i can try to write an importer into AYT

Eeek, actually come to think about it, i'm not so sure it would work since AYT only supports one effect type, where as vortex has effects(called samples) and ornaments but i guess it could still be achieved with less accuracy

Twilighte · Post by **Twilighte** » Sun Feb 15, 2009 12:22 pm

I took a further look at the Vortex text dump facility and tried to write an importer. This was after Baggio asked why i didn't just convert notes first then worry about other stuff later.

Anyway their are two issues in the conversion..
1) AYT has one entity for Effects on a note called SFX whilst Vortex has two called Samples(similar to SFX) and Ornaments(Portamento).
This will be dealt with when we have progressed passed converting Patterns.
2) The other problem is with note ranges in a single pattern. Vortex supports 96 but AYT supports just 60. However since Vortex has up to 32 Samples and AYT has 64 Effects, we can use SFX 32-63 for shifted Note to cover C-5 to C-9.

So still some work to do. another issue is how to get the music loaded into the editor. AYT does not support Tape operations. However i may take the generated music file, do a bin2tap then a tap2dsk /old2mfm then copy it over