MacOS x86 - It's super sweet!

Well, there's been quite a silence from myself just recently as I've found out that you can get MacOS X (Intel version) to work on some standard PC hardware. Hell I'm writing this post on my current setup at the minute! You can see a pic of the box to the right.

For those of you curious as to what spec this little beastie is, here's a quick spec - bear in mind that this system was built purely as a test rig:

Asrock P4Dual-915GL Mobo
Celeron D 335 (2.8GHz)
512MB DDR400 RAM (2 x 256MB Sticks)
20GB HDD
Asus 16x DVD-ROM Drive

I'm pretty sure I'll be making this system better soon by adding more RAM, a bigger HDD and a wireless card.

Where did all this start? In a VMWare session on my trusty old laptop...



So now I can see why Gasman uses a Mac, I'm so taken by it all that my next major investment may well be a MacBook. Or at least a laptop which is compatible with MacOS x86 ;)

XM2PT3 Beta - AT LAST!!

Well, I've been quiet for a bit mainly due to working on a new prog. It's called XM2PT3 and is a basic XM module (PC) to ProTracker 3 (Speccy) converter. At the minute it's capable of converting the following:
First 3 channels of all XM patterns,
Basic appregio to ornaments,
Note slide up and down,
Note portamento,
and Tempo change.

The output of the program is all to the screen, but it can be piped into a text file and loaded straight into Vortex Tracker II. Part of the process evolves looking at sample names and including relevant sample data in the output. This just requires a little work before hand to change sample names in the XM to names like bass, main, snare, etc.

So what was the first XM I converted? It was a 4 channel XM version of the Hi-Score table from Monty. The original only really requires 3 channels and the forth was just an echo of channel 3, so it was a nice mininal effort conversion :)

Below you can see the start of the conversion text (in the DOS window) and then what it looks like in Vortex Tracker II.



Ok, I'm off to play with SkaleTracker to make me some nice XM's to convert :)

Mega-Xfer!

Well, after about a day of building a test box, loading windows 2k and then downloading all the updates, I've finally made a start on the >400 +D disks to xfer to pc as mgt disk images.

I'm basically making backup copies of ALL Bogie's and my +D disks. So far I've done 7! The pile doesn't look much smaller, but at least the disks are xfering without errors. Which considering they're over 10 years old, isn't bad. Infact some may be even older!

In the time it's taken me to type this short amount I've managed to do another 4, so we should be done by about xmas I think :)

The start of the end?

Well, I finally decided to make a blog which was just me. So you can see I do actually do stuff in my otherwise non-existant zx life.

So what's cooking mr. la sir?

Well, ideas are floating around at the minute for a secret project between myself and K-0S.
More details on this as they become a little more concrete.

Music wise I've been working on a few AY tunes that are all far from finished.

To insanity, and beyond! :)