First post, by wbc
Hey there again!
I would like to present here a tiny and totally sporadic project i've been working recently - a musicdisk (or, in other words, an executable compilation of tunes) for ESFM - an enhanced FM synthesizer found in ESS AudioDrive/Solo-1 series of audio cards. I've been researching retro PC FM chips for a while, and was always curious about ESFM (which was also researched at Vogons). As you may know, the multi-system chiptune music editor called Furnace Tracker added ESFM support in one of recent updates, and after listening to a couple of demo songs, I immediately came up with an idea of playing them on real hardware. After a couple of sleepless days and nights, hacking register dump from Furnace, writing a player, music data packer and user interface, it ended up with this little musicdisk :)
YouTube videos: party version video demonstrating "shell to DOS feature", and post-party version with full track list
As for system requirements, it runs at solid 60fps on my Pentium 90 + 8 MB RAM + S3 Trio64 + ES1869, but I guess it should work on 486DX too, just a little bit slower (interface-wise). FPU is required, though, as interface bits were optimized for Pentium. As a bonus, it includes a "shell to DOS" feature, where you can listen to tunes while working with ordinary DOS applications - with a bit of trickery (read included .txt file for more info) you can even run DOOM under it! :D
Download HERE // also available on Pouet and Demozoo
P.S. it does even run directly from floppy, by the way :)
--wbcbz7