SIDPLAYER NEWS #8  February 1987

THE ENHANCED SIDPLAYER - ERRORS AND CORRECTIONS

"COMPUTE!'s Music System for the Commodore 128 and 64: The Enhanced Sidplayer"
By Craig Chamberlain
Published by COMPUTE! Books
ISBN 0-87455-074-2
Book and disk combination  $24.95


Sidplayer, the popular music system for the Commodore 64, has been completely rewritten to support new editing and song playing features, and to run on the Commodore 128 and 64 computers.  See Sidnews #7 for more information about this new product.  The following documentation file lists the known typographical errors, omissions, program bugs, reported problems, and suggested improvements.

TEXT
1. (vi) Under the Acknowledgments heading, Stan Halaby's name is misspelled as Stan Halavy.
2. (vi) The following two paragraphs were omitted from the Foreword, and should follow the Acknowledgments:

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Craig Chamberlain is a senior at the University of Michigan, majoring in Computer Science.  Harry Bratt is also a senior at the University of Michigan and is majoring in Linguistics and Philosophy.

For this version of Sidplayer, Craig wrote all of the programs and the text, and Harry designed the Editor including its screens.

3. (18) After Figure 2-4, the sentence should state that eight octaves (numbered 0-7) can be displayed.
4. (40) The section titled Resume Playing should mention that the Resume feature is also not available if the song stopped playing due to an error.
5. (69) Under Decrement Measure-Marker numbers, the message that appears in the message window is DECREMENTED not DECREMENT.
6. (76) The "." key to select a dotted duration is not listed in the keystroke summary.
7. (76) The meanings for INST/DEL and SHIFT-INST/DEL are reversed in the keystroke summary.
8. (190) In Figure 14-9, a sharp sign is missing on the last C note in the first measure.  The notes should be labeled C, C#, F#, and C#.
9. (258) Under VDP and VRT, an undocumented feature of the P&V command is that it will allow vibrato and pulse width vibrato to continue during a rest.
10. (262) The filename of a Koalapad format picture file must be padded with spaces to a length of 16 characters for the Rename to work.

The chart listing instrument parameters on page 349 of Volume Two was
 omitted because it isn't possible to emulate instruments realistically
 on the SID chip and because the settings give different effects on
 different SID chips.  There are no "magic numbers" to give you the
 sounds of various instruments.  A parameter list is a helpful starting
 place for creating sounds, but sometimes such a list discourages
 experimentation.  The best way to find new settings is to experiment
 and to examine settings in other songs.

DISK
1. The Player freezes up when it opens the directory and an error such
as Device Not Present occurs.

2. The Editor does not detect if a non-music file is loaded when the "*"
wildcard has been used in the load filename, so the error NOT A MUSIC
FILE is never reported.  What often happens with wildcard usage is that
the .WDS file for a song gets loaded instead, and the Editor crashes
when an attempt is made to display the notes.  The best advice is to not
use wildcards when a song file has a corresponding words or picture
file.

3. On the Command Screen, the F7 feature to advance to the next
occurrence of a particular command with any value is not reliable for
DEF and CAL commands.

4. The C128 version of the SID COPIER utility will crash under some
circumstances.  This is possibly caused by the program not having as
many free blocks to copy as displayed.  Try leaving 50 blocks free.

5. The sync mode sample song TPI14 is missing from the disk.

REPORTED PROBLEMS
1. Those with a good musical ear will notice slight timing differences
in songs played on the new Player and Editor.  This is probably a result
of necessary code changes to support the new features.  Try playing any
problem songs on a screen without sprites to see if the timing is
better.

2. A few existing songs may stop playing on the new Player due to a
Clobber error.  This error occurs when too many commands are placed
between notes.  A sure way to get this error is to define phrases at the
beginning of a voice which are not used until later in the song.  This
is not a good practice, and warnings about this practice were included
in Volume Two and in other documentation.  Fifteen or twenty commands at
the beginning of each voice are just too many for Sidplayer to process
in one jiffy.  Wi th the new playing code, songs which came close to
causing a Clobber error before may actually do so now.  Songs with this
problem can be restructured so that they will be playable on the new
Player.

3. Some people have reported differences in filtering effects on the new
Player compared to the earlier players.  This is being investigated.

SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENTS
1. On the Player, have the Return key work like the F1 key so that it
may also be used to select songs.

2. On the Player, when playing a song with words and a picture and the P
key is pressed to go from a full picture to a split picture, the
Singalong words always appear in the window, even when it was the text
lines that were last displayed.  Have the program remember whether words
or text lines were last displayed, and redisplay them accordingly.

3. On the Player, remove the dancing dots that are visible at the bottom
of the screen when a song is playing on a Commodore 128 in 64 or 128
mode.

STATUS
The errors in the text may be fixed if there is a reprint.  The program
bugs will be investigated and fixed, and a new master disk will be
produced if there is a disk reprint.  The suggested improvements have
already been implemented, and cleanup on other programs such as the SID
MENU is being considered.

The author would appreciate being informed of any other errors found in
the book or disk.  He may be contacted on the following
telecommunication services:

Delphi       CRAIGCH
PlayNET      Craig C5
Compuserve   72240,114
QuantumLink  CraigC12