Quote:
Originally Posted by ReadOnlyCat
Indeed, these are the ones I was thinking of.
I would have thought using 7bit samples would have provided a large boost though but maybe I overestimated it.
Do you know if there is an available open source tracker which implements these tricks?
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The original OctaMED 1.0 mixing routines pre-shifted the sample data 1 bit right so that all 4 voices could be doubled for a total of 8 when competing standards (TFMX) could only do 7 on a stock 68000. The rest of the story is purely academic in this day and age. Preshifting a sample one bit right is cheaper and shifting the whole mixed pattern x bits right is usually also cheap enough on a modern CPU.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ReadOnlyCat
Soft synth could be a possibility indeed, particularly to reduce memory needs, specially given that the corresponding samples could be generated and cached in advance when there is idle CPU time in the frame but they still have to be mixed together.
It is hard to say though without FM synth knowledge whether good samples are computationally intensive to generate or not. I seem to recall reading that the best MegaDrive/Genesis sounds were obtained by varying the FM parameters dynamically with the machine's Z80 but I am not too sure anymore if I actually read it or if I deduced it from a few reads here and there.
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Try out HivelyTracker on an AHI mixer equipped Amiga to find out (or try AHX for non-mixing). AHX requires an '020 for the editor and an '030 is recommended for Hively. The mods are quite small but some features are very CPU intensive.