It's time 4 da calculator!



About HoustonTracker 2

HoustonTracker 2 is a music editor/sequencer for the Texas Instruments TI-82, TI-83/82STATS, and TI-83+/84+/SE. It allows you to compose and play multi-channel 1-bit music directly on your TI graphing calculator.





Features

• 3 tone channels
• 1 non-interrupting drum channel
• up to 128 note patterns
• up to 64 drum/fx patterns
• sequence length up to 255 pattern rows
• 16-bit frequency precision
• 8-bit speed precision, can be configured per step
• various effects, including:
- L/C/R stereo hard-panning for tone and drum channels
- 8bit duty cycle control
- duty cycle sweep
• 2 user definable samples
• up to 8 savestates
• edit during playback

sound example

website
download (includes 82p/83p/8xp binaries and docs)
source

Bug reports? Suggestions? Feature requests? Best to post them in the dev thread over at the 1-Bit Forum.


UPDATE 2016-02-19

New version 2.10 released! Features an improved sound routine, several new effects, better keyhandling, and a build for TI-82 Parcus models. Also, various bugs were fixed. The download links above have been updated accordingly.

Full list of changes:


Code:

This is phenomenal, how long have you been working on it?

This really is amazing, i can't believe that's coming out of an 82. The sound effects are really amazing, i bought a headphone adapter just for this program a couple years back

elfprince13, as far as i know the project's been going on for at least a few years, i remember an old post at Omnimaga from 2012. Actually, it appears that post is exactly three years old today

Great work, as before, on the sound quality and track editor

Yeah, this is an improved rewrite of Houston Tracker.
The three major community sites of that timeframe grew topics for Houston Tracker in 2012 or 2013: https://www.cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9099 , https://www.omnimaga.org/ti-z80-calculator-projects/houston-tracker-1-bit-music-editor/ , https://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=11626 .

Thanks y'all

It's indeed a completely new software. The old HT had some major design flaws in terms of UI, and also I ran into several critical bugs that I couldn't fix, so I decided to abandon it.

@elfprince13: HT2 was a lot of work (and probably will continue to be) - started coding in February, and have been working on it almost every day since then, with some longer breaks in May and September. So I'm more than pleased about the positive reception so far. Also, I should mention that I had a small, but very dedicated team of beta testers, without whom this wouldn't have been possible.

@chickendude: Haha, I didn't realize. Reminds me, I need to update 1bitpack at some point.

@Lionel Debroux: Thanks for the praise, and especially for spreading the word on TI-Planet

Congratulations on getting this featured on Ars Technica and a few other sites around the internet, utz. Not only have you raised awareness of the long history of calculator-powered music machines, you've produced a tracker far above previous alternatives in the capabilities and features that it offers. Kudos!

I have been using HT2 now for 3 days, and have loved its capabilities and quality, even writing some tracks from sheet music and the radio. Is there any way to share the tracks with others without having to send over the whole program that includes the savestates? Will the computer-side software ever be finished, so that the tracks can be written/saved/loaded/edited off-calc? Is the sound-sample given available in program form so I/others can play the sample form the calc itself?

Great work on this, it's truly an amazing program, and it will be replacing MT3 for my main on-calc music-playing software (I'm not going to delete MT3 off my calc, I have worked hard to write some good songs for that) as I don't need a computer to write songs (and it has drums!).

Unfortunately I think the only way to share songs right now is to send the whole program over.

utz, this is absolutely phenomenal. This is the first I have seen this project and I'm truly amazed at it. Keep making awesome things!

Cheers Kerm, I hope the TI community in general will profit a bit from the buzz about HT2 as well.

@NoahK, thanks! I've started to work on the savestate manager utility, but there's still quite some work left. I hope to publish it together with the next HT2 update, which is due either end of November or early next year. I actually don't know any high level programming languages, so it's quite a learning process for me The demo song was made with an unstable beta version of HT2, so I prefer to not share it publically. That said, I should certainly look into packaging a few demo songs with the next release.

@AHelper, thanks mate!

Could you release the key sequence for the demo using something like SmartView to catch the key presses?

Oh, I have no memory of how I made it, actually. It took a while
If you're looking for a simple step-by-step guide on how to get started, have a look here:
http://irrlichtproject.de/houston/manual/manual.html#quickstart

Wow this looks (or is it sounds?) awesome!

Do you plan on porting this to the CSE?

I thought the CSE has no analogue link port?!?
I've been thinking about the possibility of outputting sound via USB in direct mode, but unless someone donates me a CSE or CE this is unlikely to materialize.

The 84+CSE still has a legacy I/O port; the 83PCE and 84+CE don't.
The mismatch between the large screen size and the same old Z80 processor as on the 84+ family would probably be the main roadblock to porting HT2 to the 84+CSE...

Is there any way this would work on a ti-84 cse?

It's good to read the thread (or at least recent context) before posting. You'll notice this was literally the subject of the previous three posts before yours.

Yeah. Just to clarify, it would probably work on the CSE, but only with some major modifications to the gfx code.
I have no intentions of porting it myself, but if anybody else want to have a go, feel free to pull the code from github.

If I might make a suggestion: it would be nice to move the binary blobs + built products out of the git repo, and into attachments to releases.

I have a problem with saving songs.

I'm using a ti 83 PSE and when I save a song it only saves the note patterns, not where those note patterns are located in the song. When I load the file I can type the numbers I need on the main screen and the song plays fine because the note patterns are still stored but I have to do this every time to get it to play. Do you know why this is? Am I doing something wrong?