Adlib Tracker II - the official website

I just spent a few hours porting the code over to FPC. It's perfectly possible, if you enable Turbo Pascal compatility, swap out the TMT-specific stuff (DPMI unit, a few types/calls such as TRealRegs, etc.) with their Free Pascal counterparts. AFAIK inline assembly is in Intel-style syntax with TASM/MASM dialect, in theory you can all enable that in FP.

Unfortunately.. and extremely frustating.. I basically ended up giving up because of bugs.. in Free Pascal, fairly ridiculous. They claim to be a "professional" compiler, but the bottom line is that the DOS support just sucks balls and elementary stuff such as external assembler support (TASM/MASM) is completely broken.

I guess I'll open up a GoogleCode project for this stuff.

@ijsf: That was quick... you're just great, man :) I hardly believed somebody would make a crap in that undocumented stuff! As your question regarding Google Code and GitHub - please feel free to submit the sourcecode to any code-hosting-alike site you find interesting, I currently don't have time to make such things in 'good quality', it means I would just register with mandatory minimum to make a new project, which would result in bad starting point. Please take this as you are doing me a favor :-)

@GhstWlf: Honestly, can't really remember what exactly was the point, but I'm sure I tried to use some of the latest version of FPC back then (around 2005 or so), but there were issues which were not trivial to resolve (too much inline asm to rewrite, or something like that). But feel free to try this... or anybody. I would be grateful, and so will be AT2 community, maybe. As long as I can remember, FPC-compiled code was way much better and faster than the TMTPC stuff.

@ijsf (and probably subz3ro): Have you tried free pascal to compile AT2?

@Newk: No, basically because this software is solely written for MS-DOS. It'd pretty much require a complete rewrite.

@subz3ro: BTW, have you thought about hosting your code on Google Code (or perhaps GitHub) and adding some other contributors? IMHO it's a neater place to put some source+docs, etc. in comparison to SF.

Also, I stumbled upon a bug with the latest AT2 release .exe crashing on the newer (pentium 3) slave system I was testing on. Compiling the sourcecode with TMT Pascal 3.90 seemed to fix the problem.

ijsf: awesome!

would it be possible to compile it to run on linux machines?

@subz3ro: Fair enough. You may be delighted to know that I've gone ahead and implemented MPU-401 support myself. My current version extends the tracker and adds a "synth"-mode that accepts commands (notes, etc.) from MIDI through the MPU-401 interface.

My setup is currently: Host with a DAW (Renoise), connected to a MS-DOS PC (with a genuine SB16/OPL3) slave by MIDI port running. The slave runs my version of AT2 and has its SB16 line-out streamed back through a FireWire audio interface into the DAW. This turns Adlib Tracker II into a full-fledged standalone OPL3 MIDI synth, damn.

Exactly what I wanted. Pretty awesome, I think ;)

I guess I'll commit these patches sometime, somewhere soon.

Congratulations on open sourcing the program! Watching the .pas files brings back a lot of memories when I used to code with Turbo Pascal :)

@ijsf: Sure, I was thinking this way at the time when the program was majorily developed, however the problem was I never owned MPU401 keyboard (I'm no musician) and since there was no feedback on the program back then (however it may sound funny now, I didn't even know if it will be used by somebody else than me :)), I gave up that idea..... Anyway, program is open-source (already like a year) now, so if somebody still has a PC with that interface, it's possible to further enhance the program. I'll be grateful to him/her :)

subz3ro, did you ever think of adding MIDI/MPU-401 support to Adlib Tracker II? Are there any technical issues or pitfalls?

Thanks.

@encore: Got it running on my T8000 (win98) too now after following your advice so thanks for sharing. I had previously given up! Had to remove the sound drivers and reinstall the one you list. Works perfect. Only thing I haven't managed to do is get it to fill the screen. Toshiba Hardware Setup in the Control Panel has a "LCD Display Stretch" mode which half works, but over stretches horizontally and not enough vertically. Any ideas?

PS. This laptop also has a PCMCIA Xircom Modem/Ethernet card, so this is typed in on the actual machine. :) It also features an USB-port which works fine with USB-memory sticks (there are some hacked drivers for Win98 available online) so I'm currently using the machine to code Commodore 64 stuff using PSPad and an old version of CCS64 (for testing), then transfering it to an USB-stick and run it on the real C=64 using a 1541 Ultimate II-cartridge (with USB-support). Sweet! Ok, enough off-topic! DS.

HS: "16 bit audio" is a vague term, but yes, as far as I know its a SB16-compatible soundchip that outputs both 8 and 16 bit audio. The processor is an Intel Pentium II-300 MHz. I recently swapped the harddrive for a silent and faster option - an IDE-compatible SDD-drive! Transcend 32gb. Nothing fancy SDD-wise, but it works fine in this case and the computer is silent. Next up is to swap the battery as well.

@HS: do you get slowdowns with the tracker program only, or with the player as well? in principle, for slow processors, some visual stuff in tracker program can be a problem, however, most of the time, the limitations are in the wait cycles for OPL-chip in combination with heavy instruction traffic (i.e. many channels with macro instruments etc.)
as the visual stuff, if necessary, you can always finetune with "cpu_saving" option in the config file, but I think you already know that ;)

@encore -> Is this laptop one that has 16bit audio? I was looking for a laptop that had SB16 compatible soundcard and OPL3 so I could also use the awesome program AXS as well (DOS version is way better than windows version...). Also, what is the clock speed of this laptop? I have a Tecra520CDT. Some 4OP stuff with macros slow AT2 down on it.

http://pistonsource.iiichan.net/friends/fmstuff/

Some dabbling with adlibtracker II. Enjoy

Finally got the Toshiba Tecra 8000-laptop (that I was given years ago) to work with Adlib Tracker II. According to the specs it has the 'Yamaha 3D sound effect-enabled OPL3-SA3'. When I first got it, I tried to install a bunch of linux-distros on it, but the machine was too limited compared to the distros I tried to install. Then I installed Win98SE and all the specific drivers was of course missing (so only pcm-samples worked and it had a small screen resolution by default), so I just gave up.

Today I downloaded and installed the graphics, sound and 'utilities'-drivers for that model from Toshiba's site (just 'google toshiba laptop drivers') but still couldn't get the fm-synthesis to work. AT2 acted like it would work, but no sound. I finally dl and installed the sound-drivers ('95v2343.exe' in my case) from Yamaha's own site: http://www.yamaha.co.jp/english/product/lsi/download/

That did the trick. Finally, it works! :) With the utilities-program I could also set all gfx-modes to fit to the screen (so VGA and text-mode will fill the screen). Awesome. :) Looking forward to play around with AT2 and play some Wolf3D on the balcony. Thought I would report my investigations here in case someone else is interested in this laptop model.

Seems to sound quite accurate OPL3-wise (but then again, if Yamaha provided the chip, no wonder).

Seen this promotion-video for Ad Lib soundcards before? Hilarious. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAt_OKfjS3E

Hi Ox! Thanx for your contribution... it's a good idea to give people some hints for the start with FM-tracking. As to your question how it's going - well, I'm living myself fine, not much space for FM or coding in my out-of-office time, though.... with my wife, we are eagerly expecting our first child (at the end of April), so it will be going somehow diametrically opposed to what I've been used to till now, soon :-) Keep up the good work!

And hows it goin, subz3ro??!?!

Hi friends! I recently put out a tiny zip file package of 2 at2 songs (in at2 format and mp3) and a collection of adlib instruments I made. You can download the zip package here: http://www.oxygenstarpower.com/fmf001.html KEEP FMING!!!! :)

Some possibly usefull info;
in the FAQ it is stated that there is no known PCI card with OPL3....

I can confirm that the Yamaha YMF-7xx (XG midi) series of PCI cards do in fact have an OPL3 on-die (chip is not seperate but is physically present... -no- software emulation...) and the OPL3 function is accessable from win9x and pure DOS... (a program is needed to turn the chip on upon boot in dos but thats it... the driver is on yamahas site...)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_YMF7xx

unfortunatly these cards are nolonger made....

Got it running by trying on my very old Siemens Nixdorf PCD-5ND Notebook with ES1688F soundchip (has OPL3 inside). :) It has only a 640x480 display and doesn't show the right "line" column but its ok I think. Had to deactivate "Doze Mode" in BIOS which underclocked the P75-M in idle and made AT2 crash. Now I got a reason to renew the NIMH battery cells ;)

Bohen: regarding use of EGA mode with AdT2, it's of course possible... with proper set of compatibility option in config file (comp_text_mode=1 => this corresponds to 80x25 mode)... however, if you are refering to the fact that your PC is equipped with EGA card only, this is then blocking point, as the program requires VGA-compatible card

Bohen: sorry, but didn't really get the point of your last message... can you repeat, put questions with the question mark at the end, etc.? thx!

BeRo Mini Tracker for Windows, is YM3812/YMF262 tracker, has bugs/questions!
About Win32 tracker..

Any tracker for DOS, use YM3812 tracker on DOSBox 0.74, Adlib Tracker II can not use EGA mode..
Digital FM for DOS, YM3812 tracker, can use EGA mode..

Bohen: for OPL2-equipment, get Adlib Tracker II 2.0.27 from the download section

Any YM3812 tracker for DOS
has not for Windows

Do work YM3812 tracker for Windows?

Pulselooper: nice work, bro! keep on doing like that.... and thx for credit btw :)

Hi folks! Just released my new EP (titled "80486"), totally composed and performed on AT2. Download it here: http://www.andrezp.com/pulselooper/releases/pulselooper_08486.zip

maximilian: nope, MIDI/MPU-401 interface is not supported by the program

I wonder if it would work with a real midi keyboard connected to the midi port of the sound card..

ZOMFG i bought an original old AdlibSoundcard. Its so cool this sound on this old Card!!!!.. Sounds like 8bit.

After many requests for making AT2 open source, I managed to create a SourceForge project yesterday.
Full source of version 2.3.38 was included so far....
Please note, the code is very very very poor commented, as I've coded it all alone very intensively
at the start, and at the end there was no time to adequately comment over 50 thousand lines :-)
Anyway, hope some of you which are interested in it, will find the useful information there, and who knows, maybe there will be new versions of it someday... maybe it will be finally ported to Windows as well :-)
Have fun with the code, and keep the OPL3 spirit alive!

PHP bug finally resolved! Thank you Encore :-)

flo: sorry, no... 640kb is just too less... some very old versions were running without XMS buffering, but I didn't keep it as the times gone by....

is there a version of adtrackII that runs on machines without XMS with a 186-processor?

Demoscene and FM synthesis forever :)

Moogle!: if it's kinda fine stuff, maybe we could add it to the Program FAQ ;)

Andre, send an email to johnny_5@sfx64 and I'll try to help you since I cannot post a bunch of stuff to this baord.

Hi folks, I started using AT2 these days and I'm just loving it. But there is a problem: after I use the program for about 3 to 5 minutes, it freezes and I have to restart my computer. I'm using it on DOS 6.22, with a Toshiba Libretto 70 (Pentium I, 16mb RAM, OPL3).

Can anybody please help me? I searched for this Libretto only to use its sound chip: :(

Thanks!

is there a way to convert adlib tracker II files to a midi file? i would like to take a sequence made in adlib tracker II to work with in another program which imports midi files. thanks for the help.

Hey all, check out the new site: http://www.brendanbailey.net/Home/music-portfolio

It's got my Renoise music up there, but no AT2 stuff at the moment. I've included a link back to here for good measure. Thanks!

Brendan

Okay, I'm looking to get another laptop, but I have some requirements beyond OPL3 for it's sound. Here's specifically what I need...

300-400mhz cpu
16bit soundcard + opl2 (opl3 obviously preferred)
fairly compatible with DOS programs without using COMMAND in windows 9x.

Any solutions? The reason why is because my Techra 420CDT doesn't support stereo 16bit sound, so I can't use a lot of later DOS audio progs. When I try to look up soundcards on laptops, I always see Soundblaster Pro/16 Compatible, but there's a BIG difference between the two in that Pro only allows MONO 44.1khz and a specific audio program I want to use won't run because of that reason.

Any help is appreciated!

The link to LLSID won't work... It's not permanently down, is it? Because that player sounds really intruiging...

GreaseMonkey: don't know if I'm copying all what you want to say, though.... =)
P.S. Program FAQ is not blank, so is not any of the other content... but there is some bug on the page which requires occasional page refresh (hit F5) to show the full page content... I already told about it to encore longer time ago, but he don't know what's the problem...

Guy.: you mean to use the UI from AdT2? I hardly believe it's usable for your purpose, as it is quite complex and poorly documented... I think better for you would be to start with something easier and maybe improve it further and further (as it was done for AdT2) - unfortunately I don't keep the old sourcecodes, these would be maybe useable

Ugh. I'm trying to make an A2M player for FreeBSD (I have a hacked sound driver which creates a /dev/ node for FM purposes) and this thing is a horribly complex beast and half the time I don't actually know what the hell I'm doing.

Just something I need to point out, and subz3ro, you might want to point this out too: A2M requires aPLib 0.26. Y'know when you're on the ibsen software website? Copy the "download aPLib 1.01" link, then scrub away everything after the last slash, and you should get a folder view.

P.S. The "Program FAQ" is blank.

Subzero-> In the future, I may try my hand at a little bit of DOS programming and would like to do an OPL3 music program that isn't tracker-like, but more experimental in interface.

If I ever (probably won't, but you never know) get around to it, would it be okay to use your audio source to build an interface on?

Thanks.