Sinclair ZX80 / ZX81 / Z88 Forums

Since more AY boards will be appearing soon and I've received a few requests for software/tunes I think it might be a good idea to perhaps collect the materials that people need all together in one place.

So, to kick things off:

2016-11-08 This is my test player for PT3 files. I have long since forgotten where I got the tunes from, but I recall being sure that they are all freely distributable. If you're concerned about a file please say so and I'll remove it.

I have included the BASIC source for the menu system, which in its current form requires ZXpand. It can be re-compiled using 'ZXTEXT2P' which has disappeared from the web as of this date, but can still be accessed using wayback machine.

Adding new PT3 tunes is pretty simple and I will go over this as soon as someone posts new tunes to add
Instructions are also included in the zip, along with everything needed to proceed.

For those of you who simply have to go bigger I'll be looking at the PT6 'turbo' files and player soon.

/SirMorris

I can help with that Charlie as I have 1000's of PT3 STC tunes as well as adapted versions of Andy Rea's PTE and STC players which play the tunes automatically with out having to select them one at a time.

Let me know what you need and I will do my best to provide.

As for my compositions I will have to pass as I use and multi track the AY like a traditional instrument and not in a chiptune sense so unless you develop a player that can accommodate guitar drums and bass a well the AY then I'll have to pass on new compositions although a turbo TRACKER would be nice as at the moment I'm having to run two ZX81's with AY side by side into the desk.

As an example here is the player consisting of compositions by someone I really respect,AY composer the man from Krakow, Yerzmyey.

To use just load the file "JUK" then run. pressing the"N" key will advance the player by one song "P" goes back by one song.

Line 20 of the basic denotes playing time and can be altered to suit, I did this as a lot of AY stuff is just an endless loop and using this method allows a reasonable snapshot of each tune to be played.

The files are untitled because the player as it stands needs a simple S1 S2 S3... format and as I'm not skilled enough to make the player accommodate proper titles I simply renamed them to suit.

Should Yerz not want his work presented in this way I will happily remove and apologise in advance but I think my musical brother will be cool about it and approve.


Charlie if you feel this treads on your patch in some way I'll remove it as well.

Anyone trying the player in an emulator may be disappointed as most of them cannot hack Andy's programming wizardry and glitch badly, however a version of SZ-81 created and modified by Olofsen for myself, works just fine and as far as I'm aware is the only successful emulator to run Andy Rea's AY tracker program without glitching and to my ears has a spot on AY reproduction. Should any interest be shown in that I will contact Olofson and ask his permission to post his emulator fully implemented for AY use as per my own studio set-up.


One very final comment. should anyone desire a plethora of music files and use ZXpand file commander with their xpand please note the amount of files stored in any one folder is limited and doing as I did by dropping 2000 files into a folder meant that it just don't work and you have to drop out of file commander and load the old fashioned way.

Also if anyone wishes to learn how to turn the three AY channels of their tracker creations,for example,into three separate WAV files that can be manipulated and saved in a WAV editor like Audacity or want to add their own instruments to an AY track I can help with that as well.


ANNND BREATH!!

Mark

Thanks Moggy! It's a shame PT3/STC can't store metadata, which would allow for track names to be preserved.

The binaries for both players (zxptmod6.bin) are identical so the files are interchangeable.

sirmorris wrote:Thanks Moggy! It's a shame PT3/STC can't store metadata, which would allow for track names to be preserved.

The binaries for both players (zxptmod6.bin) are identical so the files are interchangeable.

Now That I didn't know thanks for that.


Your next mission should you choose to accept is to create an STC PT3 DE-compiler to SNG format then a turbo tracker.

Should you decline this mission me and my big dog Tyson will come and get you cos we know where you live HA.



The reason I worry about the titles is that it would be nice for those who created these wonderful noises to have the player display the true name of their creations rather than S1... S2 etc but seeing as some of yerz's titles are profane best leave it this way.

Moggy wrote: The reason I worry about the titles is that it would be nice for those who created these wonderful noises to have the player display the true name of their creations rather than S1... S2 etc but seeing as some of yerz's titles are profane best leave it this way.

You only need a mass storage device, which allows a BASIC program to read the filenames within the directory of the current path. So you could keep the origrinal names.

I added this little hack to the USB-driver (used in the German ZX-Team): the command

PRINT USR 8195,"D,2"

tells the driver at 8192 to read the current directory ("D") and write the name of the second directory entry (",2") to screen (into the first line). There a BASIC program can PEEK the D-file to read the name into a BASIC variable for further usage (e. g. within the player).

Siggi

PT3 files and STC files are not the same, iirc I found source code for the pt3 player first from sergy bulbers website, the STC player cde was reverse engineered frm the original spectrum version. Of soundtracker. There is a song name field in STC headers ( first 100 bytes I think ) my STC compiler again iirc sets this field to "zx81 soundtracker"

Regards Andy

Andy Rea wrote:PT3 files and STC files are not the same, iirc I found source code for the pt3 player first from sergy bulbers website, the STC player cde was reverse engineered frm the original spectrum version. Of soundtracker. There is a song name field in STC headers ( first 100 bytes I think ) my STC compiler again iirc sets this field to "zx81 soundtracker"

Regards Andy

Thanks for that Andy nice info re the headers and at the risk of sounding sycophantic mucho mucho gratitude for the tracker, compiler and player all in daily use in my case since their inception.

Now pleeeeease write a DE-compiler so I can get some more sample ideas.
G'wan you know you want to.

Hmmm a decompiler.... i guess it's possible, I'll have to dig out the original code for the compiler and see if i can remember what it's doing.... or maybe the player.... yikes... been a long time since i looked at that.... in the mean time I'll see if i can fimd the specification for STC files

Regards Andy

Andy Rea wrote:Hmmm a decompiler.... i guess it's possible, I'll have to dig out the original code for the compiler and see if i can remember what it's doing.... or maybe the player.... yikes... been a long time since i looked at that.... in the mean time I'll see if i can fimd the specification for STC files

Regards Andy

Yeah STC or PT3 To SNG would be magic, tall order I know.
You created the tracker etc four years ago I seem to recall, and I remember you saying always back the song files up in case of a crash. Well I have to say it is probably the most stable piece of software I've come across and has never glitched ONCE in the four years I've been using it, kudos to you for that.
Almost forgot Andy happy birthday by the way!