OctaMEDPlayer from A-EON Technology (WIP)

@densho

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I have been working with MilkyTracker recently, and I can tell you it's a very capable and stable program. The best tracker I have ever used on an Amiga system. There is also DigiBooster 3 commercially available from APC&TCP, but it lacks in features compared to MilkyTracker.

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Protrekkr is very nice but I find it unusable for real work because of its display settings. The program's just killing my eyes!

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It is. Stay tuned

@trixie

the whole strategy to buy old sources and recompile them to sell the PPC hardware is a big mistake anyway, expecially if they seriously expect to get new PPC users by that.

If you really want to attract new users develop new software that is written from scratch. To update the old software just to get it running natively on 4.X is not attracting many new users and without considerably new features there is no reason in the 68k community to buy it. I only say PPaint. It is never selling enough to make it profitable. Buying sources is relative cheap but only first step.

Better to develop new versions of the old software making bugfixes and add new features and not convert it to reaction keeping the existing GUI and 68k. That might be profitable. Or you create new software from scratch for 4.X that is interesting in todays terms. But that needs high investments and is very risky. Current strategy is in the middle and has no chance to succeed. It is obvious if you look what happened to the software that was bought by amikit/aeon. They are killed by that.

@OlafS3

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Absolutely. The effort needed to modernize 1990s sources (often written to poor programming standards) is so big and the technological debt is so huge that it really makes more sense to start from scratch.

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I think A-EON have learnt their lesson in this respect.

@trixie
And you don't forget that those programs were created for the needs of the 90s, when the mod/med was the king in music format, now the needs are highter mp3 of 320kb, several tracks, channels, etc.
With Deluxe Paint doesn't brought us big improvements, in fact still I use the original version of Cloanto and I bought the version of A-EOn.

@Templario

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Yes, this is all part of the technological debt I have mentioned.

Alinea has the rights of Art Effect and Amiga Writer and sits on them. Not a single update all these years.

AmigaKit and A-Eon got the rights of all this software and sit on them as well.

Even the people that have the rights for Final Writer. They do some work but after all these years no real release, other than some demo on Icaros distribution.

If they do not intend to put some people to work on them, we will see no new versions and updates. In my opinion all these software will have more chances if they get open source. At least this is going to be a good step to start updating them than start from the scratch.

@walkero

the sources should be opened from start

but all (except Alinea perhaps) have paid considerable amounts of money for the sources so I fear they will sit on it forever

Unfortunately this is quite common in Amigaland. Either because they don't have the resources to continue the development, or there's some legal malarkey surrounding it. It's sad how many great programs end up collecting bitrot.

@Templario

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Octamed supports lots of tracks (I don't remember how many but definitely more than the eight the name suggests) and 16-bit samples. Loading samples from MP3 shouldn't be too difficult to add. Exporting to MP3 shouldn't be that tricky either (it has support for different playback devices). It already supports loading "modern" module formats like S3M and XM (one or both of those, been a long time).

Whether that's worth an update or using the old version on a classic Amiga is sufficient is another matter. I suspect anybody who is using a tracker has moved on to other platforms and software, such as Renoise or OpenMPT.

There is lack of talent and time, money can motivate, but there is lack income, because of size of community, so trowing money at the problem does solve it, open sourcing stuff can help, again it has to be of interest to the developers.

@LiveForIt

nobody claimed that open source is solution to everything, there are amiga programs open source and nothing happens but at least there is a chance. Closed software with owner not able or interested to develop are really dead.

@OlafS3

Good points. Ppaint was a mistake because the 68k version was Free and ran fine on Amiga NG.

@Chris

Loading MP3s would be super cool.

@magnetic

And why was it a mistake to update Ppaint??

@smf

I was referring to Olaf's post where he states that the project has lost money.

@smf
Don't get me wrong I think its great that they did a Ppaint ng it sucks they lost money. There are so few developers that code for amiga.

@smf

it was not a "mistake" but no success either

The main effort certainly was needed to get it running native on PPC and not many improvements (new features). It would have been better in my view to use the existing software and concentrate on bugfixes and new features.

Then it would have been interesting for much more people and a bigger chance to get the investment back.

But there was the idea to sell PPC hardware with native (PPC) former 68k amiga software and that was and is not realistic. Additionally by the obvious fixation on 4.X making Reaction GUIs it is nearly impossible to get it running elsewhere. But again... obviously behind it is the idea to sell more hardware with the software and I do not think that this can work. Not without really huge improvements on the software to make it useable in todays terms but that needs lots of work and is propably easier done from scratch. Additionally there is the problem of the lack of money and developer resources.

@OlafS3

It did run on AmigaOS4.0 already, you just had changed the config file to use piasso96. There were some bug in fill function, that caused a DSI error, because it was writing outside of allocated bitmap. Clearly that was something that had to be fixed.

So it was possible to do a minor bug fixed version, instead of added all the extra features.

@trixie

I think you are missing the fact that many people use the old school protracker or octamed 4 because they know they layout in and out. Its like an old friend.

@LiveForIt

Im pretty sure 68K Octamed Studio works on NG.