Pandora Famitracker port for the pandora?


com64

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I was wondering... wouldn't it be awesome to use Famitracker on a Pandora? Is it even possible? It hasn't even been ported to linux (as far as I know). Source code is available and I do believe that it is written in C++... I haven't looked at the source code in a while so I might be wrong. I have done a little bit of n00bish C++, but not much. I use Famitracker a lot on my netbook and it isn't very memory intensive (I think)... I don't have a Pandora yet, and accidentally installed Windows XP over top of my netbook's installation of Arch Linux, so I don't see how I could be of much help...


Anyway, here is the webpage for Famitracker:


http://famitracker.shoodot.net/


The source is on the download page:


http://famitracker.shoodot.net/downloads.php
 
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Well, it would need to be rewritten to be able to use something more Linux friendly to output sound and as the GUI looks like it was created using Windows' own API, it will either need to be completely rewritten using a more portable toolkit, or somebody succeeds into using the Wine libraries which are responsible for those API parts, but I have no idea how independent those are, if they are bound to some core elements of Wine which are considered importable this is a no-go.


Anyway, it would be a whole shitload of work. It would probably be easier to create a new program from scratch that uses some core components of Famitracker.
 
Well, it would need to be rewritten to be able to use something more Linux friendly to output sound and as the GUI looks like it was created using Windows' own API, it will either need to be completely rewritten using a more portable toolkit, or somebody succeeds into using the Wine libraries which are responsible for those API parts, but I have no idea how independent those are, if they are bound to some core elements of Wine which are considered importable this is a no-go.


Anyway, it would be a whole shitload of work. It would probably be easier to create a new program from scratch that uses some core components of Famitracker.
I ran Famitracker in wine in Arch Linux before, and it didn't go so well. No sound was produced, and it was slow. I wish I could rewrite it... I might really start to learn some programming... what language is the easiest or most efficient on the pandora?
 
what language is the easiest or most efficient on the pandora?
C, C++, and assembly are the 3 most efficient languages you will find on any platform, assuming you mean "lowest time per unit of processing" efficiency, not code-writing or code-reading efficiency.


GTK+ (Primarily C, can be used in C++ easily, and has the gtkmm C++ binding) and Qt (C++ only IIRC) are the big graphics toolkits.


GTK+ has GStreamer, and Qt has QAudioOutputDevice, but these are a little too complex and too simple, respectively. For audio I would recommend something like SDL and SDL_mixer. It's higher level than OSS, ALSA, and PulseAudio, but lower than GStreamer.


Maybe I should look up what famitracker is. It sounds complex.


Edit: Well I tried to get to their website but I think my DNS has exploded or something. I can only seem to load sites I've been to recently...
 
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Maybe I should look up what famitracker is. It sounds complex.


Edit: Well I tried to get to their website but I think my DNS has exploded or something. I can only seem to load sites I've been to recently...
here's a little quote from their webpage:

FamiTracker is a free windows tracker for producing music for the NES/Famicom-systems. The interface is based on MadTracker and should be easy to use if you've been using trackers before.

One of the features is NSF-file exporting. That allows music created in this tracker to be played on the real hardware, or even for for use in your own NES-applications.


Some other features:


* Full real-time emulation of all channels


* Internal PCM to DPCM-sample converter


* MIDI input devices are supported


* NTSC & PAL modes are both supported

and here is the latest binary and source attached, compressed to about 1.3 Megabytes.


Famitracker.zip
 

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