Paragon 5 is, in my opinion such a miserable excuse for a tracker, even though it is the "best" of the entire collection.
ChipWarrior: "Miserable excuse for a tracker"? Paragon 5's tracker, while not the prettiest or easiest to use agreeably, was the fastest music system in it's day. It was able to pull things out of the Game Boy sound system at such speed without hiccuping once. You should be saying that about a system that's too complex for you to use, because there were a lot of musicians who were able to use it just fine.
That being said, I was able to pull off some amazing tricks with that sound driver. Pulling off Square kicks going directly into configurable notation right after it, pulling off panning echo tricks that I couldn't pull off before, swapping instruments and sound back and forth in instruments so fast that you would think that there were "2" noise channels, even simulating reverb with some well placed panned notation with some fade outs. I was able to achieve all of these tricks with a bit of practice in that tracker.
Here is a 2 minute multi-song clip of a professional, unreleased RPG soundtrack that I made using that software (original composer was Eric Hache, I was the sound engineer. Ignore the obvious added reverb effect, these recordings were "mastered" for official CD release):
Tetris Plus (Natsume) is a hit! It sounds quite heroic, I love the echoes and it is unusual that I like each and every track (mostly 3, 8, 9, 10 and 17) of the entire album.
Never heard of that album before!
The other music package is like a mixture of Super Mario Land 2 and Contra: quite vivid and experimental, but I'll always have to think of "Wild Gun's" if I hear the trademark "Natsume".
@ tssf: You're probably right, cuz I get real angry and bored if I have to deal with a program for longer than a couple of days to figure out how it works. :P
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If it comes to the crunch... you then better trust in FamiTracker!
I'm not at all surprised virt managed to make something awesome using not so user friendly software, but I know I was instantly put off by the interface. I grew up using sequencers and will always prefer them over trackers despite that trackers are probably much faster if you're good at using them. I'm jumping my current university program in part because I want to learn how to make music programs like these, and hopefully be able to make sequencer front ends to programs like famitracker and maybe a sequencer that can do everything that paragon5 can do.
Dafydd, trackers are sequencers. It's just a type of the sequencer interface. You probably prefer another type of interface, piano roll, but it is not sequencer itself, again, it's just a type of the interface.
Ok, well, what are they called then? "Piano roll sequencers"? Anyway, like your post suggests making a new interface for famitracker should be pretty easy if you know how. Paragon5 isn't open source though. Either way, whenever I learn how to make one the first thing I will try to do is make a piano roll type of interface for famitracker.
Well, interface is much larger part than sequencer itself, so it would be not easy to change interface. For example, in one tracker which I know, from 387K of source code only ~40K is sequencer code, all other is interface code.
Yes, but the sequencer code is probably the tricky part. Making a piano roll interface, while it will result in a lot of code, should still be much easier to write than the core of famitracker (sound playback, nsf driver etc). And once you've made a working interface the same interface should be adaptable to work with other programs as well, like a gameboy tracker, for example. People have undertaken more complicated projects... like making computer games. And as far as famitracker is concerned, much of the interface can be reused, only the pattern editor and the frame editor would be replaced.
Nothing tricky in the player code, really. Well, maybe NSF export would be somewhat difficult, because you have to make 6502 assembly version of player code.
I can say if you have not designed interface as independent part from very start, it's reuse will be very painful.
Games is whole different area, it's mostly about producing content, not code.
