Using 8 channels in octamed v3 and/or v6 ...?

[SamOS39]

Im quite new to trackers ..

I noticed that when i tried using 8 channels it disabled me from controlling volumes of the individual channels (and the Cxx command)

I know its all possible because i have heard music on the amiga with more than 4 channels and there are noticible changes in volume ..

  :-)

[Piru]

AFAIK that's a technical limitation of the octamed classic 8-channel mode, which itself was derived from some earlier trackers.

The technique of playing more channels of music than the Amiga hardware was capable of was first introduced with Jochen Hippel's "Hippel 7V" routine, which used one hardware sound channel, and performed software mixing of two channels as the source of the remaining three Amiga hardware sound channels. The reason for using seven channels rather than eight was because the sound routine required more processing power than the 7.14MHz 68000 CPU in the older (and later low-end) Amiga models could provide. The seven-channel routine then appeared in TFMX. Finally, the routine was optimised so it could mix an additional channel, resulting in eight channels of sound. The 8-channel routine first appeared in another tracker called Oktalyzer and Face The Music. Finally, this appeared in OctaMED.

(from wikipedia: Octamed)

Octamed SoundStudio (which does true multichannel mixing) doesn't have this problem.

[SamOS39]

ok cheers!
so what is the latest OSS for 68k?

[Piru]

From the Octamed wikipedia page:

OctaMED Soundstudio 1.03c (latest official version, Amiga)

[SamOS39]

thanks alot!

good old wikipedia!!

[jmbattle]

I wonder how much CPU time is required to playback 7 channel TMFX modules.  Given that a number of games (namely Apidya) used this format, yet still maintained very smooth scrolling.

Cheers,
James
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