SIDin #5 — High Voltage Music Engines Collection (Stefano Tognon, 2004)

Tognon announces hvmec, his collection of the C64 music-making programs themselves — editors, trackers and their player routines, with binaries, sources, documentation, examples and credits — as a companion to hvsc and as the place to fetch a player for player-identification. The article also makes the collection's one taxonomic decision: editor versus tracker, by whether note length is written explicitly.

Key claims#

• Purpose: "a new project I started after going into engines searching task"; the name echoes HVSC "but the porpoise is very different": "possibly all music engines making tools are collected, so one people can easy search for a particular one", with credits, "a good place for historical engines conservation". CSDb would be the natural home, but offline search and bundled sources and documentation are worth more, and the idea had been proposed on a discussion board before. "The main reason is however that I always like to know how a sid tune is made and knowing the used sid engines can be a good street to achieve that."
• Structure: two trees with the same layout — DATA (binaries, documentation, sources, examples; "subject to reach many megabyte of space") and CONTROL (small HTML pages describing each engine). Offline packages HVMEC-x.x-DATA.zip.gz and HVMEC-x.x-CONTROL.zip.gz, version numbers like 0.1, 0.2, split at 1 MB per file; download CONTROL to browse, DATA for everything, or one engine through the online links.
• Editor vs Tracker — each tree is divided into Editor and Tracker: "1. Editor: a program where note duration is explicitly declared. 2. Tracker: a program where note duration is not explicitly declared" — an editor has an instruction such as DUR 05 before the notes, in a tracker "the duration is given by the number of events between two notes". His three-note example: editor DUR 03 / A4 / B4 / DUR 02 / G4, tracker A4 / --- / --- / B4 / --- / --- / G4 / --- (tracker).
• Engines: Editor|Tracker / Name_of_Engine / version — names like Advanced Music Programmer or SIDwinder, versions like 1.00, 1.10, v1, v2, A, B, sometimes suffixed [1x], [2x], [4x] "if the editor was provided for different tunes speed" (multispeed); inside, the programs, data, docs and examples (DATA) or an HTML page with images (CONTROL).
• Players: an editor may use several player routines ("you know that JCH editor can use different player routines" — chordian); they live in a directory named [] next to the version directories, all routines in DATA and one HTML page describing each in CONTROL.
• Surfing: CONTROL/index.html, a frames layout — top-left links (the main page, the Editor list and the Tracker list "with some mini images"), an alphabetical editor list centre-left, an alphabetical tracker list bottom-left, the chosen page in the main right frame.
• Location: bookmark http://digilander.iol.it/ice00/tsid/hvmec.html, the index of the online and offline versions; the material sat on free web space "subject to change as soon as more space will be needed", and free hosts dislike ZIPs with executables. "All the C64 executable that are into the collection are taken by surfing the web and I hope that they are provided by the authors for free download" — removal on request; mirrors and hosting welcome.
• Next: new versions "when many new engines will be added and/or many credits and errors will be fixed, or maybe before an harddisk crash may destruct the already done work"; a progress page on the download page; a planned "sample" category "for let an easy search for engines that can be used even for making sample based soun[d]" (chip-samples).
• Help wanted: send binaries, sources, documentation; correct or improve credits; write the HTML for missing tools. Two uses: "you can found the tool you need for starting making sid music into your C64", and "you can use the players for founding the right pattern for the pattern searching engine project".

Practical takeaways#

• Tognon's editor/tracker line is a useful one for reading the wiki's driver pages: a duration byte or DUR command marks the 1980s editor family, a row grid the tracker family — see tracker and orderlist.
• HVMEC was built to be the source of known test tunes for engine signatures: generate a tune in the editor, disassemble, sign (player-identification).

Notable quotes#

"Editor: a program where note duration is explicitly declared. Tracker: a program where note duration is not explicitly declared."

Relevance to the wiki#

Creates hvmec; the editor/tracker distinction for tracker and orderlist; the collection's role for player-identification and sidid.

To verify#

• (unverified) Later versions — HVMEC 0.4 (2005) and 0.9 (2010) — are announced in the news pages of SIDin #8 and #13; to be dated from the news digest.

Pages touched#

hvmec · tracker · orderlist · player-identification · sidid · hvsc · sidin