From: aramsey@ugly.UVic.CA (Aaron  Ramsey)
Subject: A new breed of mods... how about it? 
Summary: Crazy new idea? or just plain stupid? 
Organization: University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 92 06:14:39 GMT

I've had an idea kicking around in my head for a while, and thought that
I might share it with all of you lurking around here.

I run out of memory far too fast when I am making really big mods that
involve alot of voice and lyrics... I'd really like to be able to make
a mod, sample a bunch of vocals, and create a mod that sounds alot more
'real'.... something that isn't just an instrumental or the like. I've
got the one meg chip, and have considered going to a 2 megger... but
even then I couldn't put in alot of vocals to a 5 minute song.

How to get around this? Well... I've given it a bit of thought. One way to
do it is to move sample back and forth from fast to chip ram to create
a sort of 'virtual' chip ram... that way I am only limited to the total
amount of memory that I have... problems with this? It's a little tricky 
to implement in a program like our mod editors... You've got to be worried
about the sizes of the samples, etc.... It's just a whole hairball... and
to top it off, suppose I create a really great 4 or 5 meg mod, alot of
people can never hear it, just because they have a 1 or 2 meg machine...
can't be leaving them all behind.. it's just not fair, eh?

Soooo.... here's what I propose to you guys writing the editors (PT or 
MED.. it doesn't matter to me really... no flames please) If you were
to make it so that we could load samples as the mod is playing... now
hold on a second before you scoff, and say this is stupid.. lets think
about it for a second here. My hard drive can load a 200-300 K sample
in to memory faster than I can blink.  8-) If I had some command in the
mod editor to dump a sample and load another in it's place, I could
have that sample loaded and being used in a beat or two.. no probs, but
what about anybody with a slower hard drive? And what about if we only
have floppies? Well... floppies are a little trickier I guess... I takes
a while to load stuff in... but more than 10 seconds to get a 100K file?
I don't think so. I (given the command) could be looking forward as I
write the mod, see that I need the new sample, and could dump one of
the older lyrical samples..;.. I could do this 10-15 seconds perhaps
before I ever need it... that way it would be available to me whether
I am using a floppy or harddrive. I guess opens a can of worms with
respect to memory fragmentation and stuff, but I think that it might
be not too bad to implement into the current editors. A little erro
checking to see if the sample is loaded yet, and little error checking
to make sure enuff memory is available to load it into. You could
leave the time problem to the musician. I guess floppies are still
going to have troubles in that the mods might get outrageously big
with this sort of power... it would be possible to make a 10 meg
mod that runs on a 1 meg machine with a hard drive. Even floppy
users would benefit though. I guess you might have to switch disks
a little, but what the hey! Anything to hear my Amiga sing!  8-)

Seriously though... I really think that this could be written easily
into the programs around right now. And I really think that it would
make for a whole new incredible generation of mods. I suppose that
this wouldn't be much good for you demo writers, with a need for
short good music, but for those of us writing the music for the
music's sake... it'd be unreal. I can already hear it... ahhhh...  8-)

So... What does everbody think about this? Do I get flamed for being
a visionary?  =)  Give me some feedback. If nobody is interested in
this, I guess I'll have to give it a go myself... Anybody have 
source to PT? 8-D 

-Aaron Ramsey     amramsey@sirius.UVIC.ca
 Victoria, BC Canada