+---------------------------------------------------------------+ | STARTREKKER 1.2 | +---------------------------------------------------------------+ CODED BY EXOLON OF FAIRLIGHT RELEASE DATE: 19/11-1990 Now your own local Exolon has been up all night coding on the StarTrekker just for you... But the result was worth the pain, because... The main theme for this release is SYNTHETIC SOUNDS.... Read.. ------------------------New features in 1.2-------------------------- 1. Now prints patterns while playing in 8 channel mode. 2. An FM-Synthesizer is included to make samples for you. You can make any sound from organs to whips, chains and drums :-) See special doc below. 3. An AM-Synthesizer is included to make realtime sounds for you. A bit more limited than the FM, this makes sounds similar to the Future Composer.. Doc below... 3. Diskop screen squeezed into halfheight... So you can diskop while pressing play and stop... 4. Channel On/Off gadgets in 8 channel mode. 5. You can now click on the spectrum analyzer and it turns into two COOL oscillioscope pictures... Click again and the analyzer comes back. The left scopes displays voices 1 and 4 (the left channels) and the right scope displays voices 2 and 3 (the right channels). 6. Play routine sources included on this disk: NORMALREPLAY.S - normal replay routine without "AM" sounds AMREPLAY.S - replay routine for both normal and "AM" sounds 8CHANNELREPLAY.S - replay routine for 8 channel modules 7. Maybe it's a little more bugfree now... Try it! --------*> FM SYNTHESIZER <*-------- Welcome to the FM Synthesizer! First of all I would like to send some great thanks to my friend GLUEMASTER for exploring this topic. He got inspired of the Yamaha DX FM synth and decided to write his own on the amiga. He did, and now I have made one too! And included it into the StarTrekker 1.2!! It works like this: After you have pressed RESET, you have four sinus-waves under your control. You can't change the waveform, but you can change the envelope and base-frequency for each sinus-wave. Then you can choose for each to listen to it, modulate the next's frequency or both... The program then calculates a sample of your selected length, and you are free to use this sample to whatever you want (including playing it!). You can also choose just to save the parameters (120 bytes) to disk. You have some examples in the FMSOUNDS drawer on this disk. Load, press calc, play, and learn... Some hints: Try to only listen to ONE sinuswave (number 4 f.x), then put a small envelope on sinuswave 3 and press F.MOD on wave 4. Now wave 4's frequency will be modulated according to the output of wave 3. Then you alter the envelope and frequency of wave 3 till it sounds great, then press F.MOD on wave 3 and make a envelope on wave 2, adjust and continue with wave 1. NOW, if you press F.MOD on wave 1 also, it will be modulated by wave 4, and the modulation will be fed back to the beginning, causing some kind of noise suitable for drums etc.. The FM-Synth controls: In the middle of the screen there's a rectangle containing the selected wave's (the 1-4 buttons) envelope. It always display the envelope from the start till the release ends, even if the total time is just a fraction of the whole sample. Above the envelope is a black line. This line shows how much time the envelope shows, with respect to the total sample time. Buttons 1-4 let you select which wave to edit. The TOT number is the total time for the envelope (discussed above), if you want the envelope to be the same lenght as the sample, the black line above the envelope should be as long as the rectangle. HOWEVER if the total time is longer, the line's still only as long as the rectangle, so to be sure decrease the TOT until the line begins to shorten, the increase to the rectangles end.. The LENGTH number is the number of bytes the output sample should have. The FREE button clears the FM parameters but the sample's still intact. The RESET button loads the current FM parameters with the default sound. The LOAD and SAVE let you load and save the parameters as a disk file of the length 120 bytes. The CALC button calculates a sample according to the current parameter settings. The small dot appearing up in the right hand corner of the calc button signals that you have changed the parameters since you CALCed last. The FMOD button tells wether the current wave should be frequency modulated by the preceding wave. The LISTEN button tells if the output sample should contain this wave's output or not. To get a sound at all, at least ONE wave should have this button highlighted. Now for the real parameters... From up to down: FQ This waves base frequency. $1 is very low, $4 is average and $20 is quite high. L0 Start amplitude for the envelope A1L Attack level A1S The speed that the amplitude changes to the attack level, $1 is slow and $40 is fast. A2L Secondary attack level, for those who likes envelopes... A2S Secondary attack speed. DS The speed that the amplitude decays down to the: SL Sustain level. There is remains for the time set by the ST Sustain time. RS Release speed. The speed that the amplitude falls from ST to 0. Any change of either of the envelope parameters will cause a redraw of the envelope curve. It's very easy to see what does what with the graphic representation. DO NOT set any speed to 0, unless you want the amplitude to remain at the last value. To roll values faster, press the right mouse button also. When you press SAVE MODULE a requester pops up asking whether to save the by FM synthesis calculated samples. Normally you press NO to save diskspace, the FM sounds are automatically recalculated when you reload the module. However, to use the module in the replayroutines, you have to press YES because the replaysource doesn't contain a FM generator. (Guess why...) I realize that the FM-Synth can be quite hard to understand, there has been a lot of talking about FM-sounds and calculation here and there, but load the examples in the FMSOUNDS directory and try to change some parameters, important, DON'T FORGET THAT YOU HAVE TO PRESS CALC before you can play with your sound... ------------> AM SYNTHESIZER <------------ Welcome to the AM synthesizer. Unlike the FM synth this doesn't create a sample. It has it's own internal 32 byte long samples, and changes the volume and period of the sound 50 times a second. So, it operates similar to all the other synthetic sound programs out there like Sidmon, Future Composer etc. Here you therefore doesn't have to press a CALC button all the time, just change a parameter and play the keyboard. CONTROLS: In the box you have the envelope shape. You can edit the envelope in exactly the same way as in the FM synth, so please look above for that. Below the box there's four waveform gadgets to select the waveform. There's a sinus, a sawtooth, a pulse and a noise waveform. To the left, you can edit the vibrato amplitude and speed as well as the pitch fall. The FQ value is the octave. 0 is the highest and 5 is the lowest. Again, the best way to learn is to load the examples in the AMSOUNDS drawer. The FREE button clears the AM parameters. The RESET button loads the parameters with the default settings. The LOAD and SAVE buttons speak for themselves, don't they? --------------------------------- Greetinx goes to: F/X-lab, Lord CMP, Octo, Olwon, Freddy "FISKEN", Alex "PADDEL", Toffelhero, Peter Bo X-tra Long John Silver Skold Frankenstein, and to all others who has helped me with suggestions about the 1.2... Well that was all for this time, hope to see you soon in further more advanced versions of the only state of the art music-program: THE STARTREKKER! Signed EXOLON OF FAIRLIGHT! As always, suggestions are welcome at this address (NO SWAPPING!) Bjorn Wesen Roslins v.20A S-217 55 Malmoe SWEDEN Or contact me at FAIRLIGHT EUROPEAN HEADQUARTERS: MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE +46/44247539 Or mail me on the Amiga Echo area on FIDONET to 'Bjoern Wesen'. ------------------------------1.1 doc-------------------------------- 1. Opens an own intuition screen so mouseclicks won't fall through to the underlying workbench and cause trouble. 2. MULTITASKS correctly... Just press the screen to back gadget on the ST screen and it will lie quiet in the background Wait()ing... When you want to return to the st, just select the st window on the st screen by pressing the workbench depth gadgets. 3. KEYBOARD ROUTINE REWRITTEN! Using an IDCMP port connected to the st window... The ST now works on any configuration without using the -h option. So now you can choose your own key repeat speed in Preferences. NOTE: Key repeat will be disabled when not in Edit mode. Otherwise it wouldn't sound very good if you just play with the keys, hold one down and it goes R...rrrrrrrrrrrrrr..... If you have the polyphonic mode on (see the old docs below) you can now press many keys at the same time and play CHORDS... Great eh? 4. 8 CHANNEL EDITOR! Now the editor is in MED-RES in 8 channel mode so you can edit all 8 channels at the same time... When in polyphonic mode, choose voice 1-4 with LEFT ALT + F6-F9 and choose voice 5-8 with LEFT ALT + LEFT SHIFT + F6-F9. 5. INSERT/DELETE note in the editor. In edit mode, press return and the notes below in the column will go down one step.. Just as in an ordinary text editor. Also, by pressing Backspace you will delete the note the cursor's on and the notes below will be moved up one step. 6. FREEMEM now prints with 6 chars... So those of you with 2 meg chip can see all.. 7. COMMANDS implemented in 8 channel mode: $1 Frequency up $2 Frequency down $4 Vibrato $A Volume slide $C Volume change $D Pattern break $F Tempo change It's not a very great idea to load a 4 channel tune and go 8 channels.. Because of the way the 8 channel routine works, it is very difficult to make the portamento commands in 4 and 8 mode equal f.ex. 8. The DISKOP menu now uses a real filerequester.. So you can go loading songs, modules and samples from wherever you want... There is no delete buttons on the diskop menu because in the filerequester you can delete any file you want. Some bugs fixed: When saving an 8 channel module or song the last odd pattern was lost. This is now corrected. (Thanx Lord CMP of Paradise for reminding me about that one.) Restart didn't work in 8 channel mode. I had it fixed in one version but unfortunately there was a slight version mix up. Now it's fixed. There was a bug in the NoiseTracker 2.0 when loading the .NT extra file. It was supposed to contain the midi transpose values etc. but they got overwritten as soon as the file had been loaded. This is now corrected. VERY OLD DOCS: POINT KEY: ( [.] On the keypad) With the point key you can select three playmodes. With one press, one dot will appear next to FREEMEM. You can now play with the keypad like a drum machine. The pitch for each instrument is set by pressing left ALT + the desired pitch key. With two presses, it's just like above but now the notes will be written to the pattern when in edit or record mode. With three presses, you will activate the POLYPHONIC mode. Now you can play on the keyboard, and the StarTrekker will automatically change voices. You can choose which voices are used by toggling them on and off with left ALT + F6-F9. QUANTIZE: With the quantize control, you can choose how many lines the cursor should jump when you enter a note in a pattern. The number is increased by pressing the left mouse button in the QUANT box, or by pressing CTRL. The number is decreased by pressing the left and right mouse buttons in the box, or by pressing left SHIFT + CTRL. COLOR CONTROL: Because the ordinary grey color is so utterly boring, you can choose between a bunch of colors by pressing ALT + F10. If you don't like any of them, SHIFT + F10 makes your day by randomizing the colors! MIDI: INCOMING MIDI: With the R: control you can select the channel the ST will respond to. You can play on the synthesizer's three middle octaves just like on the Amiga keyboard. The ST will NOT respond to MIDI clocks, Active Sensing or other control commands. OUTGOING MIDI: With the C: control you can select an outgoing channel for the current instrument. The L: controls for how long (how many patterns steps) the note will be played. If there is any C commands (volume change) in the pattern, these will be sent along with the notes as Attack Velocity. The T: finally is a transpose control. The ST will send out MIDI clocks in the same tempo as you have selected with the F command. Also the ST will transmit Midi Start and Midi Stop when you start or stop a tune. Remember to turn the MIDI on! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ BYE! HA DET BRA! /EXOLON BRAECKKORV FOREVER!!!!