Atari St Emu Supporting Midi Apps?

[Babrios]

So far Atari ST emulation on gp2x has been going on mostly with gaming in mind.
(Correct me if I'm wrong, because I know it only from reading and might have missed something)
I noticed, there is a growing demand for usable audio/midi apps on pandora already.
Well, we could have tons of the bestest ever written midi soft available for portable use, if we had a an atari st emu with midi support. Atari screens look like being designed for todays portable gadgets.
Some features of a complete atari emulator would not even be necessary for midi-composing. No Atari sound support, metronome click can go through midi. Monochrome mode would be enough. The essential thing being: accurate timing and midi out (opt. in too).

For portable sketching, playing into an onboard gm-soundbank should be enough (maybe dls, or sf2 support in hardware for solid timing?). Alternatively routing of midi output to usb or wlan (enslave those vst hosts on your pc's ).

Results of development could be used for general st emulation aswell, making the best use of valuable resources.

There are many Atarians/Musicians out there in favour of atari midi apps. An ST-Emu with midi could easily double the sales. I would not think twice about buying it, easy decision compared to having it for gaming only.

What do you think?

 

[Tashi]

Would be a great idea, many musicans still use Atari ST for sequencing.

But nicer would be to port a native Sequencer like lmms (http://lmms.sourceforge.net/)

Its very easy to use and similar to Fruity Loops. It has many build in Instruments (like a Synthesizer).

Here is a Screenshot from lmms: http://lmms.sourceforge.net/screenshots/0....creenshot01.jpg

 

[Babrios]

A native sequencer surely would be welcome too, though porting one is probably not that simple.
lmms looks promising, but would need to get a completely different gui for pandora.
And maybe the plugin host concept of todays daws overstretches pandoras capacity a bit.
Some things are best done on a bigger computer.
I was merely thinking of having sequencer functionalities in pandora more for musical sketching on the road.
For that an Atari-Emulator with Midi and a gm-compatible sample player with some cc-functions would be enough.

The thing that keeps musicians attracted to the Atari Midi-Apps is the creative potential of that midi mangler softs. DAWs on PC and Mac are mostly like (boring) linear digital tape machines. Atari midi-Sequencers did not have to deal with audio in the same app and have far more different effective and creative approaches to making music. Their screensize of 640x400 is ideal for pandora, even leaves space for emulator-specific menu and buttons.

A selection of (now free) Atari-midi-soft along with some info can be found here: http://tamw.atari-users.net/timidi.htm

My favourite there is Omega2 KCS from Dr. T. It has an MPE (Multi Program Environment) where several modular programs can share the same data, by that you can link different editors, Notation, algorythmic composition tools etc together.

It can be tested on the pc with steem: http://steem.atari.st

 

[Hitnrun]

I was able to compile and run a MIDI sequencer library on gp2x. It is TSE3 (http://tse3.sourceforge.net/), and libtimidity (http://libtimidity.sourceforge.net/), and I designed an integration between them, currently it plays midi files on the gp2x without the drum channel.

The library is made to be used by a sequencer, so it have various hooks for this (there is a sequencer based on it, but it is not SDL I think).

If someone wants it I can give the source code.

 

[joanne342]

The STEem Engine supports MIDI apps.

http://tamw.atari-users.net/steem.htm

and

http://steem.atari.st/

i don't know if it would be possible to use it with a gp32 though? or the implications of it if you could. i guess the gp32 would have to have some sort of midi wavetable or some means to send midi out via USB or some kind of midi out hardware mod?

it's a really exciting possibility.

 

[ldesnogu]

Steem is free but closed source.

 

[joanne342]

i think i read somewhere that the steem authors are willing to give away the code for someone to port it to the gp32 but they want to tidy it up first because it's really in no fit state at the moment and they're struggling to find the time to do that so it might still happen in the future.

 

[Babrios]

Really? That would be great! Steem is the emulator I use under windoze, and it's perfect for midi stuff.
The timing is spot on. getting a reliable midi timing can be a problem in emulations.
I tried amiga midi apps under uae and the timing went up and down randomly.

But isn't the steem engine written for x86 processors only?

There is also the Hatari in the linux domain, though, right now, it has only rudimentary midi support.
Has anyone with a developer pandora box compiled the hatari yet? and if so, how does it perform?

For running midi apps under atari emulation and a samplerlike app in parallel, the atari emu would need to be as sleek and optimized as possible. maybe it would make sense to extend the outcast st emu from the gp2x to a full atari emu with hd and midi support? I suppose it has arm-specific optimizations in it already.
So it might eat lesser resources. Is there any chance of outcast becoming a complete atari emu with hd and midi support?

 

[Babrios]

oh well, just checked it again. the steem st emulator really is written only for x86 processors, shame.
let's hope hatari compiles well on the pandora and gets better midi support.
either that, or a more complete emulation based on what'S there on the gp2x already.