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  • There's a blast from the past. At 16 years old I created Multi-Ripper with a friend, using AsmOne, and smartly included my phone-number in the mods it converted. My parents really appreciated random strangers calling years later.
    by fudgie
  • Pastor Emmanual Laphroaig [1] as well as the phRack crew [2] continue carrying the torch in this tradition as best they can

    [1] https://alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/

    [2] https://phrack.org/issues/72/1

    by Schlagbohrer
  • Doesn't mention ScreamTracker. A good example of demo group dogfooding. Unique text based UI too. As far as I can remember this was the first dos tracker.
    by momocowcow
  • A nice, somewhat nostalgic read. I had X-Copy and D-Copy both, although I'm more familiar with the later X-Copy editions that were quite purple [0] [1]. It was also my first contact with the concept of disk defrag.

    [0] https://jope.fi/xcopy/releases.html

    [1] https://jope.fi/xcopy/img/xcopy/xcopyapr93en.png

    by krige
  • > When a copy was finished (which could take some time), the program helpfully played a little "boing" sound.

    And how that "boing" sound worked is interesting in itself. It's one of the few uses of Paula's "attached" mode, where the output of one sound channel is used to modulate the volume or pitch of another.

    I put the full source code of the boing sound here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48174583

    by amiga386
  • I swear music trackers had the most impressive UI back then. FastTracker and ImpulseTracker were to me the highest piece of art and engineering at the time. They kind of hold up even to this day. Especially ImpulseTracker's instruments and sample editor.
    by p2detar
  • I first thought "Elite Sinus Producer" and "The Sinus Creator" were trackers specifically designed for creating nasal-sounding music; but of course the explanation for why the term "sinus" came to be used instead of "sine" is likely because many demosceners were from a native European background, and their language retained the Latin origin word instead of deprecating its usage in favour of "sine", as happened in English.
    by userbinator
  • I vividly remember FastTracker II, and how intuitive and tactile it felt to get things done in it, despite the minimal user interface real estate. As an example, there were no sound effects. So, I routinely manually created echo effects by copying the sounds from one channel to another one of the available channels, offsetting the notes by a few ticks and lowering the volume. It was simpler times.
    by superted

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