Is there a way to actually play chiptunes within the shell, or can you only download them? Seems like it's sort of missing its core competency if there's no WebAudio implementation of a tracker.
I'm currently working on a web tracker, and it turns out that it is /much/ easier said than done. You have all the problems of making a web app, coupled with all the problems of making a tracker (of which there are many). Plus, you seem to be suggesting a one-stop allgear tracker, which makes it ten times worse, since one doesn't seem to exist even for desktop yet.
And, a shoutout to, IMO, one of the coolest quasi-demoscene places on the internet, http://battleofthebits.org. Without them, I would never have gotten my feet off the ground with coding.
Admittedly, it'd be easier to just render all the audio to MP3, stick it on S3 (6000 chips = ~70GB of music?), and create a tracker interface that actually just streams those MP3s. Costly on bandwidth, though.
As a showcase for the MP3 approach, for C64 music there's this [1] that has more than 50000 tracks recorded from actual SID chips (because the emulators are still not perfect, apparently...). That includes a lot of pointless stuff, though (they've played back every track available, which includes game over jingles and sound effects in many cases).
> (because the emulators are still not perfect, apparently...)
The SID chips contain analog synthesizers that have a very distinct tone which is difficult to emulate in digital signal processing. There was also a lot of variance in the semiconductor manufacturing process, so no two SID chips sound exactly the same.
The SID emulators are actually very different from your typical audio synths, they don't run at the "native" output sample rate (ie. 44.1 or 48kHz) but do their processing at a much higher (closer to MHz) sample rate to better emulate some of the analog phenomena going on in the chip.
So, no, SID chips are still not "perfect" and will probably never be :)
Mmm, pretty. I had a similar project a couple years ago attempting to replicate OpenMPT's interface in the web browser: https://github.com/jdm/domtracker and http://www.joshmatthews.net/domtracker/; it played sounds in earlier versions of FF and Chromium but I haven't upgraded it to keep abreast of newer WebAudio implementations.
