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- TRACKER-SBPRO
- -------------
-
- README 6/29/92
-
- This package plays Amiga .MOD soundtracker module files on various
- hardware platforms. The bulk of the code was written by Marc Espie
- <espie@ens.fr> in Dec of 1991. Please read "tracker.doc" for his
- program notes.
-
- I have modified the code to use the Sound Blaster Pro sound card, as
- supported by my SBlast-BSD device driver for BSD Unix. The
- hardware-specific parts of the player are nicely isolated in a
- separate file, so that the package should be easily portable to other
- platforms or drivers.
-
- The original tracker package included support for Sparc and SGI audio.
- Since I do not have one of these, I can not test my modifications on
- them, but I would hope that they still work fine. Minor fixes may be
- necessary to make them compile.
-
- As it stands, Tracker supports the full 44K speed capacity of the
- Sound Blaster Pro and stereo output. For more information the free
- SBlast-BSD device driver for using a Sound Blaster Pro under BSD Unix
- on an i386, please contact me via email.
-
- Lance Norskog <thinman@netcom.com> has written a fine device driver
- for SysV variants of 386 Unix which supports the orginal Sound Blaster
- rather than the Pro. If this better suits your needs, contact him for
- more info. He has also modified this tracker program to work in that
- system.
-
- Here is a list of changes I have made to Marc's original Tracker code:
-
- 1) Changed the decompression routines to be much more flexible.
- You may define a new filename suffix to automatically decompress
- and read by simply adding a line to a structure in str32.c
-
- 2) Rewrote the command line option system to use GNU getopt.
- To the user, this means less playing with environment variables,
- more flexibility, and easier options to remember. Of course,
- options can still be abbreviated to one character for brevity.
-
- 3) New -help to go with the new options.
-
- 4) -quiet to print nothing to stdout.
-
- 5) -verbose to print a complete run-down of the MOD file contents
- in table form. This code was already in Marc's code, but
- had to be compiled in with #define SHOW_SEQ
-
- 6) Eliminated "ntracker" and "otracker" executables and added
- -new and -old options to tracker. Name-sensitive binaries bug me.
-
- 7) Merged all the header files into "defs.h" and eliminated
- machine.h, which had to be the same for every machine anyway.
-
- Please report any bugs in these areas to shaehnic@ucsd.edu. Bugs with
- the actual .MOD reading and parsing go to Marc, of course.
-
- Enjoy!
- -Steve
-
- Steve Haehnichen
- shaehnic@ucsd.edu
-