So, I had been thinking about this for a long time, and then finally I decided "why not just do it?".
So I did.
Now that Amigas with lots of memory and emulated systems also have lots of memory, this is now a thing that can happen, and happen for lots of reasons.
So, the Xenon 2 theme by David Whittaker is a very nice thing, it still sounds as great today as it did in 1989.
But what if we could enjoy the ORIGINAL by Bomb the Bass as they intended?
Well..... now you can!
So in the zone is a rather obvious zip file.
Unzip to Amiga, it should create a directory called "Xenon2Beta".
Obviously CD into that directory and assuming you have enough memory (i.e. 22MB of any type), this will work for you.
I've not done any bug fixing for Xenon 2, this is a proof of concept at the moment to see if its something people want, and it can also fix that age old bugbear of "why cant the Amiga play music as well as samples?".
Because, if time permits and other WHDLoad authors are up for it, we can now do that.
Obviously it will take up a lot of diskspace, but hard drives and CF cards etc, are so cheap and plentiful, why not use that space to good effect?
So what i've written is a fast ram sample player that sets up a one shot sample player that plays from three buffers.
One main buffer to copy the data from the music, and then two additional buffers to separate the pair of channels embedded in the music file.
The buffers are pretty small. It uses WHDLoads feature of loading from a file offset so we don't have to separately allocate any extra memory for the preloaded music file.
Obviously this system to operate on 68000 based machines, will have to be tailored on a per game basis, because if the buffer is too big, then the 68000 might have a lot of other stuff going on at the same time and it might struggle, so its finding a balance with each game to ensure it works, there is no one size fits all.
Yes there are some graphical glitches in the Xenon 2 intro, its just proof of concept, I simply ripped the data from the disk, patched it to get it to work and stop David Whittakers original tune from playing.
Only tested in a WinUAE environment at the moment.
The benefits once this is streamlined is obvious, in the game it is a heavily truncated version of Whittakers original playing on only 2 channels.
Now, we could have the FULL original Bomb The Bass music playing with sound effects, or, if the user wanted to, could record the original Dave Whittaker music as a sample which can then be converted to 2 channels with no loss of quality, and retaining all instruments and playing SFX on the other 2 channels.
Same thing with other games, turn the mods into samples, have them play through two channels (4 mixed into 2) and SFX playing on the spare 2 channels, we now have the chance to have Amiga games sound better and get rid of that age old "but its either music or SFX".
Proof of concept, let me know what you guys think
WHDLoad will likely quit with an error when it gets to the end of the music, simply because I haven't put in any error correction at the moment, remember, proof of concept
