DCPlayer - another pulsating Blender Software (BS) production
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It's yet another music CD player. This one takes very little memory, only 3%
CPU time, works in the background, and watches the joypad or joystick plugged
into controller port 1 on the CD32 or the game port on normal Amigas.
So now you can play CDs whilst doing something else using Workbench. When you
want to swap CDs, skip tracks, or something like that press a button on the
joypad and carry on with what you were doing before instead of messing about
shuffling through windows or screens, clicking on something, then finding
your way back.
I wrote it to help me to sample CDs though. Connect a sampler from the CD32's
audio output to the SX-1's parallel port, load up this, load up some sample
software, and use this to skip to the right place BEFORE starting to sample.
Easy, eh?
At the moment nobody's found out a way of ripping music straight from CD to
memory with cd.device, so this is the easiest way (just try it with the mouse
on the other CD players to see what I mean).
So, what does it work on?
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Er, the CD32. You'll need to be able to use the Workbench or a shell. You can
do that with a keyboard, a serial link which connects to the Aux port, or the
SX-1 or CD32x which connect to the expansion port.
It should also work on Kickstart 2 or above Amigas with CD drives, provided
that you're running some kind of CD32 emulation software and you've got
lowlevel.library in the LIBS: directory. Some examples...
- An A600 or A1200 with the Archos Overdrive CD drive.
- An A600 or A1200 with the Hisoft Squirrel or Power CD drive
(both these drives are really the same).
- Any Amiga with Cache-CDFS and an IDE or SCSI CD drive.
- Any Amiga with Kickstart 3.1 and a SCSI-2 CD drive.
It doesn't work with the CDTV or A570 because those machines use cdtv.device
and I don't have any info on that. So there.
Version 1.6 -> 1.7
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- Whilst stopped, the read out shows the number of tracks on the CD.
- You can quit whilst stopped - press and hold both forward and reverse, then
press stop.
- Removed the gap between tracks after I found that I couldn't sample part of
Lifeforms 'cos the gap was in the middle of it. But the timer emulation had
to go.
- When DCPlayer was started and there was more than one screen, some screens
didn't have their read out colours set. Sorted that one.
- If it couldn't get the shared pens it needs for the read out, it clears
Workbench's backdrops, tries again, returns the backdrops to the screen,
and lets them fight over the remaining pens.
- If you're using lo-res sprites or shared pens, changed it so you've got to
quit when you use eg. screen mode or overscan prefs like any other program
with a window open on the Workbench. Before it lost track of which screen
was Workbench's and went a bit wrong.
- New options - NOBACKDROPS (don't wipe the backdrops if using shared pens),
NOLORES (don't force the read out to be lo-res on the Workbench screen),
and NOPENS (don't use shared pens on the Workbench screen).
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