Xenon: Bitmap Brothers' (mega)blast from the past

Re: tracker rubbish

Tracker programs did of course exist for the PC too. I even had software which could play Amiga .mod files through the internal speaker with no soundcard (quality was very dependent on the size of the internal speaker).

There were even trackers which extended the concept to PC specifics, such as Screamtracker which could track both adlib and soundblaster style sound in the same file.

Re: Bitmap Bros...

Bars and Pipes was a lot more fun than any ST MIDI package.

I've still not found an application today that does things in a MIDI pipeline the way that did. I even wrote some tools for it myself.

It split the sequencer like this:

IN ---- (pipe line)--- [ SEQUENCER ] --- (pipeline)---OUT.

You could drop in a tool into the input pipeline and quantize or transpose before recording. Or drop it into the output pipeline and process the output. You could then choose to "toolize" the notes in the sequencer if you wanted.

But what was brilliant was being able to adjust things in real time, where as other sequencers required opening dialogs and applying things, then listening to the results, lame!

You could drop numerous tools in, MIDI echos, transpose, audio out tools (I wrote one for AHI, badly). It all worked brilliantly.

You could even join tracks together with pipeline branches.

It's a shame that Microsoft bought up Blue Ribbon and all the products were discontinued, they were light years ahead of the rest. I still consider running this software at times instead of Logic.

Re: Bitmap Bros...

The OctaMED tracker was perfect for someone just starting out in music and having a fiddle. Not as good as the professional tools obviously but clever in the way they merged channels to bypass restrictions of the hardware.

Loved Xenon and and Xenon 2. I don't remember any other games before that including music in the same way they did it.

Still fire up an Amiga emulator every so often to look back at all the coding demo's, 4k boot sector intro's and such like. Talk about squeezing the most out of hardware using as little code as possible, something a lot of coders do not bother with these days.

Re: Bitmap Bros...

This is probably the first time that I've seen Linux cited in a celebration of Gold Age British game development. What the living feck? Bitmap Bros, Team 17, Sensible Software, Psygnosis, Bullfrog, Codemasters... classic outfits. The PC did feel like the poor man at the gaming party back then, but like the ugly duckling it would mature into a swan that hatched a load of first-person shooters... cheers iD.

Just the other day, a website with .EXE Amiga games was drawn to my attention... downloaded Dune 2 'cos I read about it in PC Zone back in the day, then I realised that there was an Android port. I've wasted too much of my weekend on it!

Re: I miss my Amiga...

The problem with Workbench was that the way its nano kernel was architected — a product of its time — was basically dependent on message passing between processes being fast. When you don't have protected memory, as on the Amiga, it is fast because there's no work to do. If you have protected memory then it's usually slow as the kernel must either copy the message from one address space to another, must reassign ownership of regions of memory or must be not entire protected giving everyone access to shared messaging memory and still allowing one misbehaving application to mess up a bunch of others. Therefore Workbench as constituted had a definite expiry date.

(of course, I say this aware that e.g. the classic Mac OS was even worse with neither protected memory nor pre-emptive multitasking, yet managed to hobble on just about into the early 2000s before an overhaul was finally achieved)

As for PC vs Amiga? Yeah, it was already clear which way the wind was blowing once the PC became the machine with the super-fast CPU and the easy to address video memory. The 3dfx and its competitors just sealed the deal. The open market of commodity hardware from multiple vendors overwhelmingly based around a software platform eventually outdid the closed market of a single vendor overwhelmingly based around a hardware platform. I think it's telling that the only other computer platform to survive the '90s was also overwhelmingly a software platform, not a hardware platform (and, indeed, now largely just uses the same commodity hardware as everyone else).

Re: Super Mega Nawsome Power

Didn't know that was BtheB. 'Tis a good 'un!