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 cost of CPU. 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.
  • Supported extensions (AKY only):
    • PlayCity (9 channels, Amstrad CPC)
    • TurboSound (6 channels, Spectrum)
    • SpecNext (9 channels, Spectrum)
    • FPGA Psg (6 channels, MSX)
    • Darky (6 channels, MSX)

68000

  • AKY, without sound effect support, but with an optional SID implementation. Player made by ggn, to be downloaded here.

6502

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

Vectrex

  • An AKY player exists for AT3, made by Malban. Check out his repository.

VG5000

  • A basic buzzer player was done in AT2 with the Lightweight player. Since AT3 doesn’t have the LW player anymore, I’m waiting for some interest from the VG5000 community before adapting it to the AKM.

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.