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FamiTracker
Bear with me, I have another one of those questions for the Famiboffs. I was wondering, the original programmers didn't have laptops, and I'm assuming they didn't have Famitracker either. How did they make their tunes?
Hex editors, or they made a tracker on the system itself to deal with that, but usually the former. Some composers made their tunes with real instruments and then converted it to data themselves (not by using programs, oh no)! Some made them in hex straight away.
Most game composers had some custom tools specific to their game, though these tools weren't necessarily used during composition.
A lot of them took an existing format that there were ready-made music making tools for (e.g. tracker, midi sequencer) and composed in that, then wrote a simple tool to convert that data into their game's format.
Rob Hubbard actually did work with a musical hex editor tool of sorts, where he would basically enter in the music data stream in realtime and the tool would keep playing it in a loop for him. There's an interview where he talks about this, but I can't find it at the moment.
From some of the links B00daW posted it looks like Jeroen Tel was used to just entering the music data stream in hex numbers as part of the program source code.
Something like MML PPMCK would have been pretty feasible back then too.
So, you'll have to excuse my ignorance of the whole programming world - a hex editor is like part of the core programming language? (I'm assuming it works in hexadecimal)
I downloaded a couple of those files B00daW but didn't know what to open them with to have a look!
No, a hex editor is a tool for editing binary files. Every byte is displayed as a pair of hex characters and you can change them.
Hex editors are not really part of a programming language, but in most programming languages you can type a stream of numbers into your code (in hex or decimal or some other format if convenient), so at times it can be like a hex editor, but you have a lot more power to make it interact with your program.
