pouët.net

Guess again 😉

Like all good demoscene productions it's all smoke and mirrors.

The truth is the music is all driven from a fairly standard ProTracker replay source. To make the mix, the ordering is first determined using my standard DJ setup, quick and easy way to get a feel for what tunes work well together. From there the start / end of each module is then manually edited to make them sound like they are being mixed together by a DJ. When a mix starts or ends, the unused 8 command is added to the pattern to flag these points.

The tooling then comes into play to do the heavy lifting. All the modules are merged into one gigantic ProTracker module with unlimited patterns and a max of 255 samples. Everything is distilled into component parts, patterns are deduped and individually compressed and a list of unique samples and instrument links is produced. There is then a pass over the whole module to determine the first and last pattern a sample is needed. They then get put through a memory allocation system and we spit out just a list of when and where a sample needs to be loaded.

The waveforms was an interesting one as it seems to really fool the viewer / listener into thinking we're mixing two whole tunes together. Based on the data above we push out a separate module for each waveform, except they are checked against the original mods and removes any samples that don't belong to it. Those mods are then pushed through openmpt command line player to produce a wav file and subsequently squashed down to a set of 4bit values to actual draw them. I was particularly happy that we managed to automate this becuase the first test mix I did I had to do all of that editing by hand.

There was never an intention to fool the viewer into thinking we were software mixing, I'd have never enteratined the idea anyway because of the resource reqs and reduction in sound quality. It just looks this way because this was the design / vision we had for it from the begining.

If you want some fun, throw it into coppenheimer and take a look. My personal favourite is watching the background proc gen rendering getting paused to load samples :)

The reason E8 is used is ProTracker only runs the E commands on the first tick of the line where as the majority of the other commands run on all the other ticks.

I had planned to try and incorporate some more flexible features like this but it's rather tricky with all the moving parts and then I ram out of time. Maybe next time but until then there is always the included mod files?

I'm not surprised, it was a super hacky job! I'll wrap-up a WHDLoad soon enough.

the first bunch of modules from chlumpie had 133 bpm, so we settled for that.