Inspired by the UNIX History Graphing Project, I started to chart the relationship between different families of trackers. The result is the Tracker History Graphing Project — currently it only contains the Soundtracker and MED lineages and a few MS-DOS trackers, but to plan is to extend it to become a comprehensive map of the majority of known trackers.
It is interesting to note that many of the most famous Amiga trackers share the same codebase which was placed in public domain by the early authors. Building upon existing and testing codebase created generations of trackers through true evolution. In the PC side, on the other hand, each author was very protective regarding his code and every new tracker author reinvented the wheel creating new quirk-infested replayer routines.
Also note from the excerpt above that, contrary to popular belief that it stands from “Mahoney and Kaktus”, the “M.K.” magic ID in four-channel MODs was actually added to Soundtracker 2.3 by Michael Kleps. According to Soundtracker 2.2: “now the d.o.c news ! 1. the next soundtracker is finished ( 31 instruments ) , but only for internal use !!”. The Soundtracker History 1.05 says “12.1988 - Amiga - Soundtracker v2.2 - Unknown [Michael Kleps] Of DOC now with 31 imstruments (from now we could find M.K. inside)” but this is not the case, at least in my copy of ST 2.2.
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November 5th, 2007 at 10:08 am
I wonder where the not-so-new-skool trackers like Buzz and Psycle would fit in that chart.
November 6th, 2007 at 5:49 am
Karsten Obarski was the coder of Soundtracker for a while I think. I remember Sountracker on my Commodore Amiga 1000 ! maybe even on Commodore 64 ;-)
November 6th, 2007 at 8:33 am
The chart has room for the new-skool stuff as well, I added a few releases of Buzz and will add other trackers as time permits.