ctrix

Hey all. Super happy to be on board working with such a legend-in-code! This is just a quick test tune for now (long version will have more variation). My thoughts on the music: - It shouldn't play continuously, but perhaps be the track on the title screen and some kind of stats screen after each level? - Maybe some sound effects for 25 moves, 50 moves, 75 moves, 100 moves, etc. - Encouragement sounds when you push the blocks into their home positions - Maybe a reward 10 seconds of music at the end - I'll see if I can come up with a few different short tunes for ending different levels. - @Andrew Davie was suggesting after a while of no input, the guy starts doing a little dance (to a tune) for a while

Hi @jp48 - the tool that you really want to use is http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=67648 TIA Tracker. It's quite lightweight when it compiles and does great optimization. As far as what happened to this: AtariXMod was super hack and relied on a tracker which could deal with out-of-spec IT files. So a few testers I gave the software to were taking that IT file into other trackers which would drop / rearrange half the samples and cause all kinds of crazy! It was developed on an XP machine with Windows 98 software in an environment which I eventually lost soon after - so I only had a half broken version compiled. The stumbling block I hit was optimization / compression - detecting where all the repetition was and having patterns fit neatly in ROM. An awesome friend was coding a better play-routine and a stand-alone source optimizer but his laptop and the SD card (with backup source / binaries) was stolen from a demoparty right as we were working on it (back in 2012). So that killed the project. I didn't want to release the original tool that output sloppy and wasteful source. Once TIA Tracker came out (there was talk of it for a while) it was such a better solution and it is what I have used ever since. Thanks for all the support / optimism!

Hey Shadow - just dl the bin and put it on my cart. Awesome times!

Is anyone interested in this? http://www.vimeo.com/23589320 As the description days "Atari 2600 asm translator. An optimizer is coming in the future. I still find it's easier to put the basic tune together and turn to the assembly code to tweak everything. It uses Paul Slocum's play routine although a slightly modified version to allow triplet times / shuffles is hopefully coming in the future." It's still a bit buggy, but i figure it might make tunes easier to write for the 2600. Still about a month from stable I'd say. Let me know if anyone could see themselves using this tool (will be open source). I'm running out of steam to work on it further and wandering if I'm the only person who'd use it!! (a further demo is at: https://8bc.org/music/cTrix/Triple+Pump+%28Atari+2600+hand+assembled+cartridge%29/)