Protracker player with support for external sound fx

[phx]

Originally Posted by h0ffman

Anyways, I'll grab your latest beta and give it a try.

Thanks. But there is no beta available, just the patch. I will upload a beta of the source and tell you the URL (maybe after I had a look on the master-volume issue).

One thing I have noticed is the master volume doesn't appear to be effecting samples which are already playing.

Indeed. I never noticed that in our games, which offer a volume option in the menu, because new samples are usually playing fast enough.

I have a short fade which occurs when soundtracks are switched and the looped samples being played by the mod are not reducing until another sample is played.

Yes, that's annoying. I will have a look these days.

Is that how it currently works, i.e. master volume doesn't come into effect until a sample is triggered?

Correct. The volume is always set together with a new sample. But the last volume is stored in the channel status, so I could probably just use this and write a new volume to AUDxVOL whenver the master volume changes. Seems easy.

[h0ffman]

Legend! Gimme a shout when its ready.

[Photon]

Yes! Master volume must be changed on command not trigger because this is used in all kinds of modules to emulate arp/echoes. Sometimes also the notetempo is not fast enough to make a volume fade act fast enough (without some insane fade value requiring a - master volume reset value on the next note).

[phx]

Latest ptplayer 6.1beta is here:
http://sun.hasenbraten.de/~frank/TEST/ptplayer61beta.lha

Now all channel volumes should be changed immediately during the mt_mastervol() call.
Set NULL_IS_CLEARED=1 to test the idle-looping of samples at $0.

Complete list of changes in current beta:

- Fixed note delay command (EDx), which still played the previous note
  in some situations (Antiriad/EAB).
- mt_mastervol() must change the volumes of all channels immediately
  and shouldn't wait for the next sample being played.
- Symbol ENABLE_SAWRECT may be used to disable sawtooth and rectangle
  waveforms for vibrato and tremolo, which saves memory for their tables
  (suggested by Antiriad).
- Symbol NULL_IS_CLEARED may be used to indicate that the memory locations
  $0 and $1 in your system are zero, so they will be used for idle-looping
  of audio channels.
- Removed cia.i and custom.i include files and included the required
  symbols directly into the source.
- New function mt_loopfx() for playing looped sound effects.
- New function mt_stopfx() for immediately stopping a sound effect.

[a/b]

Not sure how much in demand it would be, but you never know...
Instead of using static tables, you could generate them with a one-time initialization. Why? Well, in case you also need the compressed player to be as short as possible.
Like in my case, I'm using a heavily modded and optimized P612 but the same thing applies, I was able to reduce its compressed size from 2.7kb to 1.7kb (trying to stuff as much as possible within a 5.5kb track, for example) just by generating the vibrato sine table and fine-tuned period table. Each routine is about 40 bytes long (and if you play "dirty" you can scrap that code so it occupies no space once it's done).
The same could be done with master volume and the other 2 vibrato tables. They don't look too complicated.

[phx]

If I would do that, then it has to be optional. ptplayer is mainly intended for games, where I would rather save some bytes in RAM than on disk.

I remember a few guys here worked on a routine to generate the tables during runtime and maybe you were one of them?
When it really works you can always send me a patch by email and I will try it.