Breaking the 4-channel Barrier: The PC Tracker War and More

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38 points·deverton··9 comments

I wonder if the source code of FastTracker 2 will be available.

Of course, I am aware of the open-source trackers (like MilkyTracker, etc), but I believe that the FT2 played a huge part of the demoscene and it should be preserved (the original source code).

Fun fact is that the creators of FastTracker (Triton) started Starbreeze, the highly successful game studio.

Also mentioned in the article is Thomas Pytel (Tran), who went on to be a lead engineer at PayPal.

Fond memories digging through the assembler code of PMODE, his free DOS extender. Learned a lot. Thanks, Thomas!

I didn't know Tran's real name until just now. I used to make everyone watch Timeless circa 1995. Now I want to call out of work and play kings quest.

ModEdit, Trackblaster, that brings me back. Raise your hand if that was you in your dad's garage soldering together a DAC to go on your parallel port ;)

"Zeg mannetje, heb jij een Gus?"

There was an info-file with some release that described how to make your own Covox Speech Thing [1], but I do not remember what it was. I thought it was The Space Pigs Megademo, but the release at Pouet does not have any text files.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covox_Speech_Thing

Wasn't it also included in FastTracker II?

About 20 years ago I wrote a MOD player for PC, using only info found in the PC Game Programmer's Encyclopedia. ( http://bespin.org/~qz/pc-gpe/ ). It had some subtle bugs which meant everything was out of pitch. I should dig it up, stick it on github, and see if I can trivially fix it.

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