Dan is right, the Pretracker replayer is slow, compared to optimized Protracker replayers, but that doesn't mean its too slow for games or demos. '
[ Show youtube player ]' and '
[ Show youtube player ]' used it and both had enough free cpu to create a state of the art A500 production.
The main benefits of Pretracker are that it takes much less RAM for pattern data and much less chipram. The 'Tiny Bubble' music took 3.6kb chipram and 17kb normal ram (for all 8 songs).
Pretracker can create sounds similar like the Korg Wavestation or Prophet VS do. You can get sounds out of it which are technically not possible in Protracker on A500. Such sounds can loop flawlessly and evolve over long time. Chipram on A500 would not be large enough to play it even as a very long sample (not to mention the inferior noisy sample quality).
Pretracker supports game relevant stuff like soundFx and subSongs.
Also making music with it has benefits:
-Automatic note delay on next channel (can get interupted by fx)
-Single channel patterns (less duplication)
-5 octaves (Protracker supports only 3)
-Octave 3-5 are playing at maximum amiga output quality
-ADSR envelope
-Vibrato envelope
-Instruments are like patterns for itself, which need much less typing for the composer
In my view you can't recreate a proper Pretracker song with same memory constraints in Protracker nor with the same quality when using the same chipmem budget.
Also i like that Pretracker allowed me to create new 'timbres' that doesn't sound like typical amiga songs.. but thats of course matter of taste..
