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- This is the OS9 port of the tracker program for MM/1. Separate executables
- for the plain MM/1 (with 68070) and extended MM/1a (with 68340) are supplied
- in the CMDS directory.
- The plain MM/1 is a bit too slow to enjoy the tracker in full. Be patient
- when you start - it takes a lot of time to initialize. When the processor is
- not fast enough, pauses will occur during the playing. This can be often
- cured by selecting a smaller reproduction sampling frequency by the command
- line parameter -frequency.
- The mono output mode has been disabled because the MM/1 output is stereo.
- To save the processor time in the critical time loop, mixing between the left
- and right channels has been disabled.
- The original program sends output to the sound driver in relatively small
- pieces. I found that the quality of the output is improved when the sound is
- played only if the buffer is full. The price for this is that the tracker
- reacts rather slowly to the keyboard commands when playing. The code in
- question is in the flush_buffer function - it is disabled right now. If you
- prefer the faster keyboard reaction at the cost of the quality, you may
- reenable it and recompile.
- Tracker can decompress the input files on the fly. For this it needs a file
- which in my Makefile is located by the variable
- COMPRESSION_FILE=/h1/snds/tracker4.6/compression_methods
- If you want to have it in a different place, define the full path to it by the
- environment variable TRACKER_COMPRESSION.
- In the version 4.6 which I obtained from the author (Marc Espie from France),
- the manual page was missing. I copied it from version 4.3 in both nroff and
- PostScript version to the subdirectory MAN.
-
- Playing on MM/1 is done using the system call _ss_play and using two buffers,
- so that when the first buffer is played, the other is being filled.
-
- The program was compiled using GNU gcc version 2.5.8 and PD dmake.
-
- Enjoy,
-
- Andrzej Kotanski
-
- (kotanski@zeus02.desy.de)
- Cracow, January 21, 1995
-