Players overview

Arkos Tracker 3 comes with several players. Which one to use depends on your needs.

  • AKG: Your go-to player. Good balance between speed and memory.
  • AKY: Fastest player (12 scanlines on CPC!). But the music are also bigger.
  • AKM: Optimized in memory. An interesting alternative to CNGSoft’s Chip’n’Sfx. But much more powerful!
  • SE: Stand-alone Sound effect players. Useful if you don’t need music, only sound effects.

RAM/ROM players

The RAM players are using self-modifying code as an optimization. This is a drawback for ROM productions, so ROM players have been developed: they use a buffer instead, at a small of CPU cost. See below for the availability.

Hardware availability

Z80

  • All the players: AKG, AKY, AKM.
  • Sound effects support in all of them, plus SE (stand-alone sound effect player).
  • ROM version for all the players.
  • Support of player configuration to optimize both CPU and memory.

68000

  • AKY, without sound effect support, but with an optional SID implementation.

6502

  • AKY only.
  • Supported machines:
    • Apple 2
    • Oric
    • Atari 8-bit with 48K RAM (800 / 800XL / 1200XL / 600XL / 65XE/ 130XE / XEGS) plus the SONari extension.

Vectrex

  • No player exist for AT2/AT3, however developers are using a small software to play YM on Vectrex, making AT3 an already used solution. More information on this forum.
  • A player for AT1 exists with the VIDE editor… If you dare use AT1, that is (please don’t ask me for support).

Other platform?

  • Do you need a support for another platform? Contact me and we may find a way!

Samples support

Samples are not supported by any player for now, except the MOD player (which is 100% sample, no PSG). The reasons are:

  • Not many people seem to care. If enough people ask me to do it, I can make a player of course. But be specific about what you exactly need. Remember that, on CPC at least, playing samples takes MOST OF THE CPU, unless complicated/cumbersome code is done (interleaving small chunk of code and sample playing), making it highly complicated to produce an easy-to-use and generic player.
  • Playing samples along the PSG is tricky on 8-bit hardware, and each coder has its need, so if you want samples, you should code your own sample player.
  • Digidrums can be played (sample triggering detection via events) but you have to play the samples by yourself.

Platform interoperability

Can a song exported in a PSG of 1 mHz (like on an Amstrad CPC) sounds well on a Spectrum? It depends mostly on the player, and a bit on the song:

  • AKY encodes all periods, software and hardware. So it will sound different from a platform to another. You should export the song once again, targeting the right PSG frequency.
  • AKG and AKM songs are composed of notes, not period. So in theory, the song can be directly used to another platform. However, pitch effects are period-based, so they will sound differently.

Morality: listen to the song on the real hardware, or load the song in AT3 and set the PSG according to the hardware your are using. Correct the pitch effects/tables if needed! So this means that you may need several versions of a song if you plan on targeting several platforms.