Native SNES Tracker (name pending)

How to use

If you are experienced in other native trackers, <insert name here> should hopefully be familiar to you.
The control scheme is optimized to the SNES's 12-button game pad. If you are using an emulator, it is recommended to use an actual video game controller for more intuitive controls.

D-pad: Move the cursor around. Hold R button to move faster!

Start: Play the section you are currently editing. Starts song from current location, or loops the currently edited phrase indefinitely.
Hold Select to play the current song from the start, or the current row if you're viewing a specific chain

Y: Inserts value in an empty space, automatically copying the last edited one.

• Hold down Y and use the D-pad to edit the value (up/down skips to the next/last larger set)
• Hold Y to hear the selected note in Phrase view
• Double-tap to quickly select the next unused chain or phrase
• Select+Y clones the current chain or phrase into an unused index

X: Erases any inserted value. Press again to insert a "Key off" entry in the phrase view
A: Navigate to edit selected Chain, Phrase, or Instrument
B: Returns to the previous view

L button: Hold L and use the D-pad to make a selection while the button is held
B with active selection: Copy the selected blocks
X with active selection: Cut the selected blocks (copy and delete)
Y while holding L: Inserts copied blocks at current cursor position (potentially overriding what was there - be careful)

Immediate roadmap:

• Known bugs
  • Some times entering the instrument view while song is playing will cause a crash (seems random/timing based) ^Fixed
  • Sample preview in instrument view often experiences garbled sounds
  • Entering instrument view on an instrument with no sample breaks sample preview (re-enter after assigning one) ^{Kinda fixed}
  • Pasting into a phrase while playback is active will not update the playing phrase, only the note where the cursor was
  • Navigating from phrase back to chain refreshes the UI when it isn't necessary, causing a short blink
  • Some garbage from previous view is visible for one frame after navigating.
    Text layer shouldjust be hidden until it's completely rewritten
  • When playing back a row in song view, you'll some times experience a visual delay. This happens if every chain on the row is different, making it take a long time to load it into the APU
• ✅ Revised CPU controlled playback ^Done
  • Start playback from any location in song ^Done
  • Pointer showing where in the song you are ^Done
  • Edit song, chains, etc. while playing, with immediate feedback ^Done
  • Sound driver sending data back telling where in the current phrase it is ^Done
  • Only transfer one phrase per channel at a time to the APU, buffer one beat before it changes in SPC code ^Done
• Improved navigation
  • Show adjacent views (chain preview from song view - chain and phrase are always visible at the same time) ^Done
  • Scroll up/down on song view ^Done
  • "Channel bar" in the top bottom, facilitates navigating between channels using some button combination
  • Navigate between selected entries in chain/phrase/instrument view?
  • Navigate up down between sequential chains and phrases based on where in the song you are ^Done
  • Select multiple and copy/paste ^Done
  • Double tap selects next unused index
  • Clone/deepclone inserted chains or phrases ^{Slim clone supported. Deep clone postponed until someone requests it}
  • Make it visible ("greyed out"?) that a chain/phrase/instrument is "empty"/uncreated where selecting it
  • Hold Delete while moving cursor to delete multiple
  • Allow removing an already empty row in a song view channel to move everything below it up by one. Ideally a way to insert new row as well
• ✅ Playback adjustments according to UI
  • Select+Start should start at current song row when in the chain view ^Done
  • When a channel in the song playback hits an empty row, it should just loop back to the top used row before an unused one ^Done
• Echo filter
  • Set echo variables and enable per-channel using commands (and per-instrument) ^Done
  • Control maximum echo delay using a global variable - restricts usage of that specific command
  • Test echo directly in instrument editor ^Done
  • Custom FIR filters (sound modulation) ^{Implemented in data and SPC driver}
  • Edit global song values for echo delay, feedback, volumes and FIR
• Rudimentary GUI
  • More pleasant temporary graphics ^Done
  • Save up sprite slots by having 32x32 sprites (a row playing in song view on all channels will now use 16 sprites plus potentially 2 from the cursor. Could easily be just 9) ^Improved
    • Did the opposite and wasted sprite slots by making mid-size cursor using up 3 sprites instead of 2. I changed sprite sizes to 8/16 though, so I would use fewer 8px slices and prevent overflow blanking out sprites
  • Visible UI hints for easier navigation
  • Row and column labels ^Done
    • Use sprites to display row indexes on song view?
  • Show more useful information on song view instead of having so many visible rows (maybe toggle-able?)
    • BPM, Song metadata, etc.
  • Highlight columns instead of rows on song view ^{Decided against this. It looks nice as it is}
  • Convert tracker font to 2bpp and move to BG3 layer, use BG2 for UI graphics ^Done
  • Dynamic variable width font for UI elements ^Done
• Basic tracker commands
  • Implement the ones already supported in the sound driver first - Pitch up/down, volume slide, arpeggio - loop and tempo change should be in song data instead? ^{Partly implemented}
    • Pitch up/down
    • Pan left/right
    • Volume (gain) up/down/set
    • Channel volume set
    • Tempo change
    • Loop data
    • Arpeggio
  • Delay
  • "Key off" entries ^Done
• ✅ Edit instruments in tracker ^Done
• Improve instrument editing
  • Select sample from visible list of every sample
  • Alter custom pitch (transpose+finetune) ^Done
  • Alter instrument while song is playing for immediate feedback
  • Define volume envelope
• Improved sound driver
  • Better use of keyoff/keyon control instead of manual volume
  • ADSR support on instruments
  • Transpose chains ^Done
• ✅ Companion software for adding custom samples ^Done
  • Ability to add as many samples as ExHiRom can fit ^Done
  • Manually pick which samples to include in a song in the song settings inside the tracker ^Done
  • Rewrite to use HiRom or ExHiRom ^Done
  • Improve SPC file ripping to avoid adding the same samples multiple times ^Done
• Define loop points in samples
• Make various SNES specific features available, make controlling DSP registers more direct using commands
• Meta data
  • Edit song and author name
  • Assign name, and icon or color to instruments. Assign custom color to phrases and chains for easy recognition
• Save multiple songs to SRAM. Export/Import songs using Patcher application
  • Compress/decompress song to save storage space ^{In progress}
  • Hold button while starting console to clear work data in SRAM (NOT saved songs) in case of corrupted data
  • UI for saving/loading multiple songs
  • Manage save data via the Patcher
• Simple view that vizualises APU memory used in both compressed and uncompressed form
  • Chain support in sound driver, handle looping from song data
  • Generate compressed song data from tracker. Use note progression macros and silent blocks
• Advanced tracker commands
  • Sample offset
  • Pitch modulation

Long term goals:

• Pretty graphics
• Tomas makes a mascot sprite
• Hardware echo filter
• Pitch modulation
• Built-in sample synthesis
• Preloaded royalty-free default samples
• Hardware noise channel
• Live mode
• Pre-emphasize samples to counterbalance the SNES DSP's gaussian filter
• VJ mode?
• 2-Player controls
• A simultaneous view of all >=8 chains playing at the same time according to the song view