pouët.net

The tracks that are released are over 1MB for each so I am still unsure how they did it. Was there some kind of software mixing? Stash runs good on my P2 400, but a few scenes on my P1 166 get a little choppy with an S3 series card with UNIVBE.

again, the samples were generated at startup. iirc the code generating samples was originally written in pascal, then hand converted to asm. either way, the samples are not in the executable, just some formulas describing them...

what havoc said. so the released xm's had the generated samples in them of course or else one wouldnt hear anything if playing them back in a module player. so the patterns/tracks in the module have the player data, while the samples are generated separately.

A bit like the Kasparov situation, where you have a "dry" XM and a version with all post-processing included.

plek: Ahh, xm2mxm. Actually now that you say the name i remember that i think that i used it to detect XM sample positions and types for one of my XM packers. It took samples, applied a DCT transform and stored a quantized frequency set, in retrospec the quality wasn't great but ok enough and for example the voidspace tune was compressed from 110kb to 12kb (the normal exepacked XM took 50kb!).

I started using USMPlay because it supported dos32 that i used in the beginning as an dos extender. I later wrote my own dos extender that copied the dos32 api for most parts for 64kb intros (the resulting binaries could be packed with apack and wwpack and that kicked upx and other overlayed pmode/w packers ass :) ).

Damn, feeling nostalgic over all this :)

I remember having only 512kb on my GUS so the soundtrack to Stash would not have all the samples. Once it was ported to Windows (the Ixalance stuff) I was astonished to hear the music as it was meant to be heard :)

Yeah, for jizz I reckon the drums are stored samples, but the filtered synths are generated and rendered out in steps with varying amounts cutoff and resonance applied via a digital filter. Quite clever.

I bought a memory extension for my GUSMAX only to hear the music of Jizz with all samples :D

Thank everybody for the nice memories from the past: it made me go back to that day when Quartz/Officium tried to make me compose an intro-tune where samples and textures were generated by the same code (i.e. you could fucking play the textures themselves, them being not more than a composition of sinus waves).
Eventually we had horrible textures and an horrible soundtrack which luckily never saw the light in a prod :)

Related to unpacking old demos to extract their modules... I found a lot of the smaller tpolm demos used WWPACK http://www.wwpack32.venti.pl/wwpack.html

I can't seem to find an unpacker for it, except for WWPACK32 which is only for Windows PE. I'm sure someone out there made something back in the 90s for WWP but who still has it?

Haha, found it in a torrent. It's WWFUCK.EXE. Yay, extracted Kocmoc from it :)

Oh? If you ever happen to find this, I would be very interested. I think I run Stash/Jizz at least once a year for old times sake. I actually played those tracks at parties as well back in the days :) Having a go with that synth would be fun!

Heh, a few days ago Gargaj mailed me about his patch of Nowhere. I talked briefly also about the datafiles we used to use for threestate and quad previously and I recalled we used to compress (and xor! to prevent HACKING!) the files in the datafile but couldn't remember which library got used for that.

Then someone mentions apack here and sure enough there's the answer, aplib :)

And I remember whizzter's dos extender too, didn't it have some interesting text messaging on startup? Or was that related to the vesa code in there?