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Dec 26, 2008

The OS you can play on it

In the old-age Amiga era, when MIDI still wasn't a reliable way to create and share computer music (due to poor audio cards reproduction), and MP3s didn't even exist, MODules were the right (and cheap) way of composing music and allow other people to download and play it easily. There has been many module formats, like MEDs, MODs, XMs and others. AROS already has a tracker, HivelyTracker, but many people felt the need of a more compatible one, which could open and edit other kinds of modules. The right answer would be MilkyTracker, whose source code is available under the terms of a open license. But, unluckily, I couldn't run on AROS the builds someone did many months ago. So, I decided to give a try compiling it under VmwAROS. I had not many hopes, honestly, but I thought that givin' a try wouldn't hurt anyone and, all the best, I would have tried compiling something big under VmwAROS. I had to add the file sdl-config in the proper location, since my AROS computer uses a RC version of VmwAROS 1.0 (in the final one, this file should already be in Development:bin), but then I made only these steps:

- launching abc-shell (sh)
- ./configure
- make
- waiting for the file to build

and... it worked!!! Now I have MilkyTracker running fine on my AROS machine. I decided to submit it to the Archives. I've added a tiny AROS launch script and a pair of example songs from Aminet. In order to run it, you'd only need to have an AHI-compatible audio device supported by AROS.