Commodore PET multichannel tracker

Videoos
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So I was flipping through some old videos and I found the one on PetSynth, which is a single-channel synthesiser for the Commodore PET, and I saw LMNC say that he was hoping that someone had written a tracker for the PET. Well… I have!

That’s running on an emulator, but it works as well on real hardware (except that through the built-in piezo squeaker it’s fairly unimpressive). It supports 3½-channel polyphony, where the half channel is a very simple PCM drum track. The polyphony is done by 1-bit software synthesis, where a binary waveform is generated on the fly in software and sent to the speaker. This uses about 110% of the available CPU time which contributes to the… quality… of the sound. Yes. The sound definitely has a quality.

The recording above is my mutilation of Jugi’s mod classic, Onward Ride, and it is the only known piece of music for it. I did also try converting Space Debris but I couldn’t make the arpeggios sound not like suck. It was tracked entirely on an emulated PET using ptracker itself.

I’d love to hear more music for it…

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Welcome @david.given!

What a great first post. I never used the Pet in my synth set-up as I’d gone down the Atari ST route with built in midi but I have seen Vince Clarke’s early development rig which did use the commodore Pet along side marvellously modified BBC Micros

Many thanks.

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Oddly enough, a lot of the ptracker editor is a port of another tracker I wrote for the BBC Micro called btracker!

Although that has a real sound chip so it’s not nearly as fun.

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