Realfun 3, a new SCC & PSG tracker in development

Realfun 3 is a new SCC & PSG tracker that comes on the MSX scene developed by the XL2S Entertainment group, well-known for other (or related) MSX works such as The Cure (the winner of the MSXdev'05 contest), the Sjasm Z80 assembler or Pletter compressor.

It is precisely because the port of The Cure for Colecovision, released this year, that Realfun 3 emerged, a new tracker for two different computer plaforms, MSX (SCC + PSG) and Colecovision (SN + PSG). The most remarkable thing when we take a look at the system requirements are its high specifications. The Z80 CPU was not powerful enough for the XL2S Entertainment team expectations so they decided to go further with the R800 implementation. On the other hand the V9990 VDP and its high resolution pattern mode was ideal for this kind of tool. What started as a simple tracker, that was the first idea, became much bigger. Despite this, a Z80 replayer is on to-do list. The system requirements are:

MSX turbo R (256 kb RAM).
GFX9000 or Video9000.
MegaFlashROM SCC+ (with SCC+ and PSG at port 010h) in slot 1.
SN chip (at port 049h).

The main features are as follows:

256 patterns.
64 lines per pattern.
Substeps (for intermediate timings, i.e. 3rds, 5ths of 7ths etc).
256 positions in the position editor.
SCC+ support with 5 channel wave morphing (up to 9 morphing effects which can be stacked and run in a list (macro) for even more interesting and continuous effects).
Dual PSG support (with hardware envelope, sync notes as in Arkos Tracker 2, separate noise and envelope frequency columns).
SN support (with "periodic noise tone" sounds to play bass lines in lower registers and white noise sweeps)
Ornaments/arpeggios.
Modulation/pitch bend and portamento effects.

Although Realfun 3 is still in development, the project is at a sufficiently advanced stage for a trial version. You can see this tracker in action showing some covers from Space Manbow - Battle Ship, Chrono Trigger - Corridors of Time, Thunder Force IV - Stand up against myself and Thunder Force IV - Metal Squad.

Relevant link: Realfun 3 trial version download
Relevant link: Realfun 3 forum thread
Relevant link: XL2S Entertainment website

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By GhostwriterP

Paladin (683)

27-10-2020, 19:50

Great news post!

By Pencioner

Scribe (1563)

27-10-2020, 20:27

The tracker itself needs TurboR/R800 but would the resulting tunes replayer work with Z80 or again only with tR?

By yzi

Champion (444)

27-10-2020, 20:39

Allegedly it's for making Colecovision tunes. Is there an R800 expansion for Colecovision?

By tfh

Prophet (3346)

27-10-2020, 20:39

And try it online here: https://homebrew.file-hunter.com/index.php?id=realfun3
Just no SN76489 support.

By edoz

Prophet (2482)

28-10-2020, 09:17

Wow.. this looks very impressive, can't wait to give it a try!

By Latok

msx guru (3938)

28-10-2020, 11:41

I hope it's not too difficult to use. Trilotracker doesn't do it for me, I am still a huge fan of Moonblaster style tracking. Or even FAC Soundtracker. For SCC, I used SCC Blaffer NT but that one lacks good PSG support....

I hope it has a lot of predefined voices. That'll help a lot. It's also what made Moonblaster and Soundtracker so popular. There a lot of casual composers, really

Going to give it a try!

By Huey

Prophet (2694)

28-10-2020, 15:59

Very nice to see the trail version out. Great stuff!
Hope to see it evolve even more over time.

By GhostwriterP

Paladin (683)

28-10-2020, 18:16

@ Latok: well, it does not really have a voice / instrument system. Instead you have to define "lists" for different aspects of a voice / instrument. Keeping things separate gives some more flexibility, but indeed it might lean a little more towards sound effects programming
Also creating the sound you want, particularly for the SCC, can be quite challenging. You have to develop a certain feel for it, know what certain effects do, or just get lucky

@ Pencioner: the final goal is a in-game music re-player for Z80.

By Randam

Paragon (1431)

29-10-2020, 07:24

This program looks awesome. I already love what you have done. Can't wait for future versions and a replayer. Any chance for a future proof of concept game with the in game music replayer with the boulderdash games you were at one time developing (was it called Dash)?

By Pencioner

Scribe (1563)

29-10-2020, 09:15

GhostwriterP wrote:

@ Pencioner: the final goal is a in-game music re-player for Z80.

Cool! Some very fresh breath from old rusty SCC

By syn

Prophet (2123)

30-10-2020, 14:26

Latok wrote:

I hope it has a lot of predefined voices. That'll help a lot. It's also what made Moonblaster and Soundtracker so popular. There a lot of casual composers, really

Going to give it a try!

I thought trilotracker was very userfriendly, when i started using it and i felt right at home, but then again ive used fast tracker (dos tracker) for a while. Before that I played around with mb1.4 and i thought it was akward as hell to use.

im looking at Realfun 3 atm, will see how hard it is to get into

By WIWO

Supporter (12)

15-11-2020, 14:55

So why my realfun3 tracker cannot run on emulator with no file directory like this:
┌────────────────────┐
MSX-DOS version 2.30
Copyright (1990) ASCII Corpor
ation

By meits

Scribe (6542)

15-11-2020, 14:56

What MSX type/extensions are you running?

By WIWO

Supporter (12)

23-11-2020, 07:35

MSX Turbo R ,Mega Flash rom SCC in slot 1 in bluemsx

By sjoerd

Hero (609)

23-11-2020, 19:29

WIWO wrote:

MSX Turbo R ,Mega Flash rom SCC in slot 1 in bluemsx

You'll need openMSX, to emulate the GFX9000.

By GhostwriterP

Paladin (683)

23-12-2020, 19:54

There is an new update available! You can use the same link.
For details refer to the forum.

By tfh

Prophet (3346)

23-12-2020, 20:54

Cool, I've updated the version on my homebrew site as well: https://homebrew.file-hunter.com/index.php?id=realfun3
Still no SN76489 in WebMSX though ;-)

By GhostwriterP

Paladin (683)

24-12-2020, 13:41

Made a video of the new song: Metal snake
Also I re-uploaded metal squad: Metal squad

Anyone else composed a song yet? Would love to hear it :)

By WIWO

Supporter (12)

27-12-2020, 13:17

Yes. Now I successfully entered into the tracker.But all of the graphics are not correct.Most of them appears in Numbers,what's the problem?

By GhostwriterP

Paladin (683)

27-12-2020, 13:32

Could be lots of things any picture?
Using emulator or real system?
Also mind the font gfx files (tracfont.001 & tracfont.002) in the same directory as the main program file (rf3.com).

By GhostwriterP

Paladin (683)

27-12-2020, 13:48

By the way I moved videos to another channel: XL2S Entertainment channel
So some of the links will be broken and require to be updated. ;)

By ren

Paragon (1934)

27-12-2020, 17:38

Oh wow, some very nice movement / animations on Lux there! (E.g. love how she goes down the rope!)
Any incentive to continue development? Thought looked promising in 2006 (and of course sad it got cancelled)

By ARTRAG

Enlighted (6935)

01-03-2022, 17:45

@GhostwriterP
is there an ASM re-player to be included in standalone projects?

By Manuel

Ascended (19462)

01-03-2022, 21:57

ren wrote:

It's really amazing.... How did you guys do that??

By GhostwriterP

Paladin (683)

02-03-2022, 18:35

Quote:

is there an ASM re-player to be included in standalone projects

Work in progress, almost there I guess.

Quote:

It's really amazing.... How did you guys do that??

with some specialized tools / features in our in-house drafting program and overly complicated sprite engine and some hard work and dedication of course

By da_Dude

Resident (33)

24-04-2022, 15:14

Silly Question:
How to get this working on Real Hardware?

* Panasonic TurboR GT
* MFR (slot 1)
* V9990 Power Graph Lite (Slot 2)

The program itself runs, but loaded songs just don't play correctly.
Also, is having a Slotexpander (Modulon in slot 2) an option to get SN (MMM) working too along with PSG and SCC?

Realfun 3, a new SCC & PSG tracker in development

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