Hi!

Today I have downloaded a AY-3-8912 replayer for Windows and lots of songs made for Speccy, Atari and CPC by russian musicians. They are simply great.
But there is neither a good replayer nor a good tracker for MSX. I know that we have got much more powerful sound chips, like SCC, SCC+, OPL-L and OPL-4, but we are not using the real MSX sound: PSG.
Am I wrong? I would like to find a MSX tracker like ProTracker or Vortex Tracker for other platforms. If there isn't any, I will code my own. And at first I thought that PSG TRACKER was a good tracker!!!!! So simple to use but lacks of lots of features, like SAMPLE edition (they are not samples, I know) or ORNAMENT editor and COMMANDS.

Kind regards,

Ed Robsy

P.S: Please, let me know if there is a good PSG-only tracker for MSX!

I think the only known real PSG tracker is PSG Tracker by Flying Bytes. The resulting music files are quite large though. :/

Another music program with PSG playing capabilities is Musica. It has support for MSX-MUSIC and SCC as well, but you can use PSG only. The program uses Music Macro Language.

It's possible to use a more recent tracker for MSX-AUDIO, MSX-MUSIC or SCC to make PSG music for and adapt the replay routine to play the used channels to PSG in stead of the soundchip it was originally written for.

... or you can use music created with a tracker on a CPC/ Speccy /ST and simply make a replayer for the MSX. It's not too hard really, check out the MYM replayer made by Lieve Tuores. I used music from a CPC (or was it a ST) for the MSX 20th anniversary demo by converting a MYM file into a more usable format (MYM replayer use very good compression but has the drawback of being too slow to be used in demo or games) which only requires a few lines to play the music and gives pretty good results for a PSG. I don't think it's worth it to write a complete tracker, you could just make the music with a Speccy /ST tracker using an emulator and then port the result file to the MSX. That's 50% less work

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Hi! Today I have downloaded a AY-3-8912 replayer for Windows and lots of songs made for Speccy, Atari and CPC by russian musicians. They are simply great. But there is neither a good replayer nor a good tracker for MSX. I know that we have got much more powerful sound chips, like SCC, SCC+, OPL-L and OPL-4, but we are not using the real MSX sound: PSG.

Maybe you should contact MkII (Matra ex-component). MkII made great PSG musics for their MSX2 games. Matra used non-conventional waveforms on PSG such as sawtooth (a trick using the built-in LFO/EG), 4bit sampled instruments, etc.

I also heard about pseudo-8bit samples playing (you can check it in some Bandwagon demos). Atari users use the PSG (they called it simply 'Yamaha' chip) to make that kind of sounds. Perhaps yo should ask Atari ST coders/musicians for this sampling technology on PSG.

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>>Hi! I also heard about pseudo-8bit samples playing (you can check it in some Bandwagon demos). Atari users use the PSG (they called it simply 'Yamaha' chip) to make that kind of sounds. Perhaps yo should ask Atari ST coders/musicians for this sampling technology on PSG.

Hmm, I guess those sample tricks consume quite some CPU time. And since the Atari ST has an MC68000 CPU instead of a Z80A, I think this would be easier on an ST than it is on an MSX2...

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Hmm, I guess those sample tricks consume quite some CPU time. And since the Atari ST has an MC68000 CPU instead of a Z80A, I think this would be easier on an ST than it is on an MSX2...

Well ... If you have a Z80 instead a 68K, you get a lower sampling frequency, but it can be done in both cases .... Z80 is cabable of playing 4bit/pseudo8bit at 15KHz more or less. Using a Motorola 68K you maybe can achieve up to 44.1 KHz.

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I think the only known real PSG tracker is PSG Tracker by Flying Bytes.

Don't forget about ANMA's PSG tracker!

Did they have a seperate psg tracker, or do you mean the psg part of their general music editor (RED iirc)?

ANMA didn't have a seperate PSG Tracker.

Besides I think there are only 2 persons on this world that can actually use ANMA's music editor

As it usually is with in-house software...

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Matra used non-conventional waveforms on PSG such as sawtooth (a trick using the built-in LFO/EG), 4bit sampled instruments, etc.

Does anybody know where to get some info on both these tricks? I.e. sawtooth and 4bit samples?

About sampled sound, have a look at Ricardo Bittencourt's excellent article fount at http://www.map.tni.nl

He's got also some useful tools to deal with WAV and convert them to MSX usable format.

Kind regards,

Ed Robsy

The correct URL is http://map.tni.nl/

Ops! Sorry for any incomvenience...

By the way, I've been coding hard these last two days, and I have done a sample editor to be included in a MSX tracker. It allows to edit 32 step samples, adjusting envelope, noise frequency, mask for both effects and tune modulation. Sounds quite well for a simple PSG thinggy. It's somewhat based upon SoundTracker for ZX Spectrum.
In a few days I will put it on-line in my own page.

Kind regards,

Ed Robsy