Seeking to hire 6502 programmer

Seeking to hire 6502 programmer
by atron on 2009-08-18 (#49977)

I'm looking to hire on an experienced individual who can handle the planning and coding of a native tracker for the NES. This is a paid position, and salary is negotiable.

If you have the skills, the drive to motivate yourself as development progresses, and an interest in chipmusic, please send a PM my way.

by Bregalad on 2009-08-18 (#49978)

Honnestly, this is at least the 5th time someone come up like this promising paid jobs to us but they just left with no replies, I still havent heard of anyone being hired by them.

by Jeroen on 2009-08-18 (#49979)

Ya, also......why not use famitracker? (or nerdtracker?)

by atron on 2009-08-18 (#49987)

I can assure you, I'm 100% serious about this. I've actually been trying to get the ball rolling on this for a couple months, but sadly, the people I've approached about coding haven't been able to keep on schedule.

Jeroen, Fami is great, as is nerd, but my experiences tell me there's a demand for a native tracker.

by atron on 2009-08-18 (#49988)

I located these two threads by searching for "hire" and "tracker":

http://nesdev.com/bbs/viewtopic.php?t=3880

http://nesdev.com/bbs/viewtopi ... ht=tracker

I'm seeing mention of the concept for a native tracker in the logs, and it appears someone even made a simple one back in the day, but from the looks of it things haven't progressed past that point.

by miau on 2009-08-18 (#49990)

I've been planning to code a native NES tracker for a while, I've postponed it several times because of other projects.
A bit more information would have been nice. What features do you need? Expansion chip support?
I suppose you'll want to put the final product on a cartridge and sell it? (Like LSDJ)

by atron on 2009-08-18 (#49992)

Hi Miau. I saw your post in one of the aforementioned threads, very cool. I've seen you around on BotB, and elsewhere. Good to see you yet again here on NesDev.

I suppose there's little risk to explaining further. I run a shop specializing in chip products:

http://nonelectronics.com

I want assistance creating a tracker that will appeal to both fami/nerd/[fast]tracker types and those, such as myself, who prefer the LSDJ SONG->CHAIN->PHRASE approach. I'm definitely interested in marketing this tracker on a cartridge, although ideally I'd like (free) emulation to remain a possibility as well.

I was working with Baron up until recently in an attempt to get things off the ground, but sadly his schedule has prevented him from moving at the pace I would like. We did little more than discuss what we would like to see from our "dream tracker", and he wrote up a pdf, which I then added some ideas to. I'll need to get his approval before making that document publicly available.

Sadly, I'm on the wrong end of IT to do this myself. I'm a network admin as well as a small business owner. I do realize that things like this are typically undertaken by one person, coded, tested, updated, distributed, etc., but the truth is I don't have the time needed to learn the ins and outs of the console. It's my goal to provide the finances needed to get this thing written, and out to the public as soon as possible.

by Bregalad on 2009-08-18 (#49995)

Well I have some experience in doing music engines, but not trackers (my engines have been MML-style track based, not pattern based).
I guess it shouldn't be that hard to port NT2 or famitracker to the NES ? The hard part would be the interface, but else it would just show the lines on the NES screen instead of PC screen, and run the NES native sound replay code.

You should definitely approach the authors of NerdTracker2 and Famitracker for this IMO. At least you can tell they're qualified for that.

by atron on 2009-08-18 (#49996)

That's a great idea, thanks for the tip. I've actually been in communication with jsr before, but have never spoken with him regarding a port.

I'll have to look into NT. I've seen screens, but have never used it or researched it, instead choosing to use fami for my past tunes.

by miau on 2009-08-18 (#49997)

atron wrote:
Hi Miau. I saw your post in one of the aforementioned threads, very cool. I've seen you around on BotB, and elsewhere. Good to see you yet again here on NesDev.

I suppose there's little risk to explaining further. I run a shop specializing in chip products:

http://nonelectronics.com

atron wrote:
I was working with Baron up until recently in an attempt to get things off the ground, but sadly his schedule has prevented him from moving at the pace I would like. We did little more than discuss what we would like to see from our "dream tracker", and he wrote up a pdf, which I then added some ideas to. I'll need to get his approval before making that document publicly available.

Ah, cool, no more need to prove your trustworthiness then, I guess, haha.

atron wrote:
I want assistance creating a tracker that will appeal to both fami/nerd/[fast]tracker types and those, such as myself, who prefer the LSDJ SONG->CHAIN->PHRASE approach. I'm definitely interested in marketing this tracker on a cartridge, although ideally I'd like (free) emulation to remain a possibility as well.

I'm a Fasttracker guy. I've never used LSDJ much, but heard lots of good things about its workflow so I would have looked into it anyway.
My intention was to release the thing to the community for free and charge a small amount for cartridges or at least provide a free version with less features to the public (again, like LSDJ).

I have been using the Famitracker source in my own projects and am kinda familiar with it, but I've also programmed my own music engine. My time schedule is probably better than Baron's currently.

I would be willing to team up with someone else on this project or at least do some brainstorming. So if you can't convince jsr, feel free to PM me if interested.

by atron on 2009-08-18 (#49998)

Great. I've already contacted Langel regarding the pdf, I'll get in touch with jsr, and will look into Nerd.

Expect an update soon.

by thefox on 2009-08-18 (#50002)

I'm a little bit interested but not sure about committing to a project like that. I have written my own tracker for Windows (Pornotracker) and of course 6502 replay code for it but haven't published it (yet).

I have thought about making a native tracker but tbh didn't think anybody would actually want to use one. I think LSDJ is little bit different because it's on a portable machine. But maybe I was wrong.

by No Carrier on 2009-08-18 (#50012)

Just popping in to say that I can vouch for atron. Known him for a while online, met him last year in real life (gasp!), and he's a good dude. In fact, he's booked to perform and do a workshop at an event I run here in Philly.

If he says that it is a paid position - I trust it is.

by Memblers on 2009-08-19 (#50031)

Bregalad wrote:
Honnestly, this is at least the 5th time someone come up like this promising paid jobs to us but they just left with no replies, I still havent heard of anyone being hired by them.

There was one NES job I did and got paid fairly for, it was a small task though. Unsurprisingly, most of these kind of jobs seem to devolve into requests for more difficult tasks for little pay, when the specs/requirements start to change after you start.. Of course I was probably guilty of overconfidence in all of those cases. Actually this offer seems better, because a tracker/music editor is fairly complex already, but seems totally achievable.

I'm a Fasttracker / Nerdtracker old-timer, but I've used MCK a little, Famitracker a little more, and some other more obscure synth and chip trackers. Never touched LSDJ.

Looking at my old dev files, back in 2003 I was working on my own native tracker. I only made it as far as testing my format, and doing that on one channel only. Like thefox said, I also was skeptical that anyone would want to use a native tracker. Around that time I also made a speech synth with a native phoneme-based editor. Also I've designed a synth chip as a sound expansion for an NES cart that desperately needs music editor support (a long time ago jsr said he'd support it, but I haven't shipped any hardware to anyone, so naturally it's still in obscurity). So yeah, my background makes me quite interested in this project.

I work full-time, so unfortunately it's not like I could work on something like this extensively on a daily basis. I could do maybe 12 hours per week at the most. But I definitely could use some money for my NESdev bank account (for my R&D and production plans). There's always very little left over from my day job paychecks, despite me being a cheap bastard.

So yeah, if this job has a realistic goal (seems to be the case), but also realistic timeframe and compensation, then yeah I'd definitely be up for it.

by atron on 2009-08-19 (#50033)

I'm really happy to be getting interested parties on this. Baron got back to me, and gave the OK to distribute the preliminary design concepts:

http://nonelectronics.com/nestracker.pdf

And my response:

I would like to see an option to either arrange in classic tracker fashion/lsdj style arrangement. In other words, the user can choose between the LSDJ song->chain->phrase method or just go with a down-scrolling feel. I prefer the LSDJ feel, as it's a bit easier for me to program loops, but there will be others out there who would prefer it the other way around.

I would like DCPM and instrument tables placed on the far right, making 3 rows and 4 columns instead of 4 rows and 3 columns. Obviously if we had a classic/lsdj switch option some of these windows would need to rearrange.

by thefox on 2009-08-31 (#50320)

I don't think having two separate interfaces is a good idea, it will make the tracker a lot harder to code. LSDJ style interface probably makes it easier to pack the music data efficiently.

by Memblers on 2009-08-31 (#50336)

I've never used LSDJ, but from look at some youtube vids of it, I don't see what makes it different from a tracker. Except that the pattern length on a tracker is traditionally 64 lines, and seems to be 16 on LSDJ. Am I missing something? Guess I could try it out for myself, but not if I don't have to.

Personally I think 64-line patterns are a bit silly on NES, especially since most parts of songs don't have a unique series of 64 lines, they almost always repeat much sooner. What also annoys me to no end, since I'd gotten better at composing stuff sometimes, is how it's stupidly hard to do triplets in a traditional kind of tracker setting. And it also seems like there's no space-saving way to transpose short phrases, at least not on any NES trackers or even MCK that I can recall (would be a huge memory-saver for composers who care).

by mic_ on 2009-08-31 (#50349)

Quote:
And it also seems like there's no space-saving way to transpose short phrases, at least not on any NES trackers or even MCK that I can recall (would be a huge memory-saver for composers who care).

In my MML compiler (which doesn't support the NES) I have support for patterns (which are kind of like subroutines). So you could write stuff like:

\1 { t125 l4 cdefga }

A \1() D6 \1() D0 > \1()

by thefox on 2009-09-01 (#50353)

Memblers wrote:
What also annoys me to no end, since I'd gotten better at composing stuff sometimes, is how it's stupidly hard to do triplets in a traditional kind of tracker setting.

Yeah, that's true. The only somewhat reasonable way to do this in a tracker is to use "note delay" effect, which delays the note by specified number of ticks. Unfortunately neither NerdTracker nor FamiTracker seem to support this feature (Pornotracker does though ).

This effect originates from Amiga .MOD format. So you can do this (with speed 6) to have three equally spaced notes in four rows:
Code:
C-4 1 000
D#4 1 ED2
G-4 1 ED4
--- - ---

Of course it's still pretty cumbersome if you change speed etc. And also it reserves the effect column.

EDIT: like Banshaku said, FamiTracker does support note delay (effect Gxx).

by Banshaku on 2009-09-01 (#50358)

thefox wrote:
Yeah, that's true. The only somewhat reasonable way to do this in a tracker is to use "note delay" effect, which delays the note by specified number of ticks. Unfortunately neither NerdTracker or FamiTracker seem to support this feature (Pornotracker does though ).

Isn't the GXX effect in famitracker the same note delay you're talking about? I think it is.

by tepples on 2009-09-01 (#50360)

thefox wrote:
The only somewhat reasonable way to do [triplets] in a tracker is to use "note delay" effect, which delays the note by specified number of ticks.

I'm too slow; I was about to suggest that.

Quote:
And also it reserves the effect column.

Famitracker has four effect columns IIRC.

by Memblers on 2009-09-05 (#50495)

This reply is a little late, but..

Yep now that you mention it, I remember using the EDx effect in FT2 (rarely). And also I've used the Gxx effect in Famitracker. But yeah you must be right about it being cumbersome with a different tempo, because I was doing some Iron Maiden covers and had a heck of a time. It definitely didn't help that Famitracker at the time didn't use the Gxx until you made an NSF, but happily that's all fixed now. One of the covers I didn't finish was "Phantom of the Opera", where nearly every note in every channel has a Gxx effect on it. G01,G03,G05,G08?? That's a little bit tedious! Sounded almost right, but almost doesn't quite cut it for an epic tune like that one.

I can't think of any solution for a tracker where triplets wouldn't look strange in the editor, but I'd think it better to have something look stupid if it sounds right and is easier to edit.

BTW if anyone happens to be curious about the Iron Maiden covers I did finish, they're here: http://2a03.free.fr/?p=pub&dir=Memblers (Afraid to Shoot Strangers, and The Ides of March).

by atron on 2009-09-07 (#50502)

Well, were I forced to push the project in one direction or another, I'd lean towards an LSDJ arrangement. It's what I'm most comfortable with, personally, there is a large population out there that has gotten accustomed to it as well, and it's something that hasn't been brought over to the NES yet.

I will add, though... to my non-coder mind, it seems it would be relatively easy to take a single chain, with, say, 8 phrases, all sixteen steps long, and display those note and effect values as a 128-step scrolling "classic" tracker view.