Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cbmvax!cbmehq!cbmdeo!adspdk!hclausen From: hclausen@adspdk.CBMNET (Henrik Clausen) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: NoiseTracker V2.0 out! Summary: Weird origins of NoiseTracker. Message-ID: Date: 8 Aug 90 20:13:12 GMT References: Lines: 42 >In article ceej@pawl.rpi.edu (Chris J Hillery) writes: >BTW, does anyone have any kind of story about this program? I mean, it seems >like a group effort among the Amiga Community.. people keep making their >own versions of it, from SoundTracker 2.3 to 2.5 to Noisetracker, et al... >interesting... Very interesting, in fact. The current NoiseTracker seems to be written by two danes (LaBri == Lars and Brian). Presumeably, they disassembled the original (commercial, I think) Sound- Tracker - really back to the asm source, and set off to add stuff and improve the workings of the original. This was (is) of course illegal, but read on. Various NT versions have been around in Europe (2.1 is RSN), and is very popular, judging from the discussions around it, but it also seems to be incompatible with certain hardware configurations. It's written purely in Asm of course. The author (Karsten Obrowski) of SoundTracker of course met these NT versions on various BBS systems. First he was probably angered, but the improvements on SoundTracker where so dramatic that he ended up being quite pleased with it. He's currently considering placing SoundTracker in the Public Domain, and this would solve the current legal problems around NoiseTracker. We had this brought up in the Danish Amiga Echo on FidoNet. Among others, one of the authors (Lars) of NT showed up, and we discussed this to the end. We decided that there's no real reason to be concerned about the legal mess, though it's strictly speaking partly stolen from an original, commercial program. I hope Marco doesn't pick up his Flame thrower now :-) Real interesting piece of code hacking! Have a nice day -Henrik -- | Henrik Clausen, Graffiti Data (Fido: 2:230/22.33) | | ...{pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!cbmehq!adspdk!hclausen | \__"Do not accept the heart that is the slave to reason" - Qawwali trad__/