Progress on Maxtrax has slowed down as the player is in good shape already. I looked a bit at Desktoptracker an am now pondering what to do next.
The problem with Desktoptracker:
I exchanged some mails with Kirben, he knows a bit about the Acorn-Version of Simon.
- the files arent matching the available specifications, either ALL the music files have similar errors when transferring them from disks (the OS dint complain about anything when transfering, so thats unlikely), or they arent simple Desktoptracker Files but compressed or otherwise modified variants
- He tried running the game under an Emulator, but getting only noise instead of music (he cant rule out emulator issues tough)
- I tried the modules under xmp, which doesnt recognise them directly. If I fix up the headers it quits or crashes.
So I consider this task dead.
Improve Paula (Amiga-Sound-Chipset Emulator).
During implementation of TFMX and Kyra I already added some missing features and slightly changing behaviour to the existing “Paula” class. The scumm-engine also has a “Player-MOD” class which does the exact same thing in a slightly different manner. The first step of the task would be to create a single class which enough functionality to be sufficient for all Amiga-Games supported in ScummVM… or even better just be able to serve as base for any kind of Amiga-Soundformats which use some halfway sane methods of generating sound. Primary this will require an interface to allow direct hardware-access or OS-level abstraction (which allowed queing up many commands).
The second step would be to make every Amiga-Format use this class and, as far as I am able to, verify everything is still working. This is the bare minimum regarding deliverables for this task, further improvements are possible like providing high-quality interpolation or emulating the switchable lowpassfilter.. and then there could be ample time wasted trying to optimise the interpolate for speed without sacrificing noteable quality =)
C64 Soundsupport
I seen this issue creeping up in the devlist talks. Not sure how much work this would be and in what state the gamesupport itself is. If there is a pressing need for that I could look at it.