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.  With 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 