Well, it’s 2014. The demo at work went well, the full project is approved, there were many celebrations, and a number of small bugs in legacy projects got fixed up. That closes out 2013 and brings me back to normal at work.

The time away from the low-level “this is the next thing along this path” coding at home gave me some time to think about whether that was the right path, or even an effective path, and I decided that it really wasn’t.

Repo Shakeup

To blow off steam between the demo and end of the year, instead of coming back to music, I wrote my first-ever hack: Item-passable blocks which act as air when Samus has a specific piece of equipment enabled.

Then, I deleted the alien-spc repo. The idea of one great GUI that allowed for awesome editing (and “random seeking” via emulating from zero-to-playhead in a background thread) would have been technically awesome, but after spending over a month just getting the capability to pass audio between threads—-without any actual emulation happening—-it was clear that this was the long, slow way around.

In place of that, there’s midi-spc-kit. My vision for this is a pair of Python scripts (sharing some common library code in midi_spc), one to handle copying from a MIDI to an SPC image, and one to handle copying changes made in the SPC image back into the game ROM.

MIDI for tracker music?

I actually plan to parse the MIDI event stream and automatically find the pattern/track/song loop points, to optimize the SPC output. Size is going to matter.

And with that… Happy 2014! Let’s see if I finish anything music related this year!