Uzebox music production

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Artcfox
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Re: Uzebox music production

Post by Artcfox »

I thought there already is a MOD player, but the only game that uses it right now is Tornado 2000?
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danboid
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Re: Uzebox music production

Post by danboid »

Uze has written a xm converter. What I'd like to see is a Uzebox app to play (4 channel, at least) mod or xm etc files from SD card without any conversion being required.
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Artcfox
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Re: Uzebox music production

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danboid wrote: Thu Feb 09, 2023 4:06 pm Uze has written a xm converter. What I'd like to see is a Uzebox app to play (4 channel, at least) mod or xm etc files from SD card without any conversion being required.
I'm not talking about the XM converter, I'm talking about the MOD player that's in the kernel now. You can find where the code is by using the command:

Code: Select all

git grep MOD uzeboxSoundEngine.c
I believe it only reads from flash though, since CunningFellow is simultaneously streaming a huge number of sectors from the SD card for the blue background movie every video frame. In the other thread that CunningFellow was talking about gaining back a lot of space by storing his song inside disjoint NOPs spread evenly throughout a section of his flash memory, that song is a MOD.
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uze6666
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Re: Uzebox music production

Post by uze6666 »

I'm not talking about the XM converter, I'm talking about the MOD player that's in the kernel now.
It was called the 'MOD' player just the sake of simplicity really. Also what is the kernel supports just a very small subset of the protracted format. What is actually flashed in rom and played is a FastTracker 2 module but pre-converted to a custom format with my java tool in order to compress the patterns data.
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Artcfox
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Re: Uzebox music production

Post by Artcfox »

uze6666 wrote: Fri Feb 10, 2023 1:14 am
I'm not talking about the XM converter, I'm talking about the MOD player that's in the kernel now.
It was called the 'MOD' player just the sake of simplicity really. Also what is the kernel supports just a very small subset of the Protracker format. What is actually flashed in rom and played is a FastTracker 2 module but pre-converted to a custom format with my java tool in order to compress the patterns data.
Oh okay. There isn't much documentation on it. Thanks for the clarification!
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danboid
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Re: Uzebox music production

Post by danboid »

It would be great if you could document how we can use your java XM converter Uze.

Should it be able to convert any xm file or is there a limit on channels / instruments / patterns? What would be the correct javac command to build it under Linux? It seems we would have to edit XmConvert.java to set the input file to use.
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uze6666
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Re: Uzebox music production

Post by uze6666 »

I'm not surprised if you need to type in the filename in the code. Theses java tools were bare bones as I always worked in eclipse to program and run the code. Moreover, the XM stuff was mainly done for Tornado2000 with some hope that I would clean it up the day someone would need it. I vaguely remember that most were happy with the MIDI workflow and didn't care much for the MOD engine.

But It's been quite some time. I would need to see if I can at least reconvert Tornado's module or if the code has rotten beyond repair. In any cases, there's a lot of limitations because I was on tight memory budget for Tornado. It's obviously limited to 5 channels and pattern must be 64 rows. It won't accept/convert any samples and the patches files must be made by hand outside of the tool. And you have to make instruments in your tracker that sounds like your patches. Besides that I don't think there was limitation on the number of patterns or orders.
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danboid
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Re: Uzebox music production

Post by danboid »

uze6666 wrote: Mon Feb 27, 2023 9:48 pm It won't accept/convert any samples and the patches files must be made by hand outside of the tool. And you have to make instruments in your tracker that sounds like your patches.
Thst's what I was wondering so in that case I don't have any use for this tool, it doesn't offer any advantages to me over using MIDI files.
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