Notator.

[Cosmic Puppet]

I wonder if anyone on here uses Notator?

I used to use it (and previously Creator & then Logic) a lot back in the 80s & 90s...I am trying to find (unpack) & get my setup working again but life keeps getting in the way of hobbies & suchlike!

I ended up using a boot manager (Xboot I think it was) to select between different combinations of accessories & utilities as Notator wasn't compatible with a fair number of my usual programs.

I've shunned life a bit for my hobbies.

I tried Logic 5 for years on the PC running inside my virtual XP, but never actually finished anything. Wrote an album with Notator and was full of inspiration so decided to see if I can step back in time. Yeah. Notator's a pain! There's a program called LED Panel which displays the time in the top right of the screen and disk access "lights" but it crashes Notator.

[Cosmic Puppet]

Congrats Cosmic Puppet, it seems you've just found a new bug.

Let me report that issue to EmuTOS Team

Yeah, that would be ace thanks.

I wonder if anyone on here uses Notator?

Actually tracked down the origin of a problem in Notator.

768 Resolution.jpg (85.73 KiB) Viewed 7323 times

Right Limit Reset.jpg (83.16 KiB) Viewed 7323 times

But... when you run in 1536 resolution, you have to reset the right limit every time.

1536 Resolution.jpg (84.92 KiB) Viewed 7323 times

Right Limit Not Reset.jpg (84.82 KiB) Viewed 7323 times

After trying a different copy of Notator from Notator.org I started trying to track it down and realised that it happens after loading New Song when 1536 mode is switched on you get this bar position that needs to be reset every time you enter a new bar position. It's written into the program. I guess they forgot to reset it.

[anodyne]

Hi there!
I'm one of the EmuTOS developers. Cyprian mentioned on the EmuTOS mailing list that your Notator display was wrong in some situations, specifically the "double colon". So I'm here to help figure this out.

First question: are these shots of the screen (i.e. with a camera), or dumps of screen memory? If they are screenshots, can you get a screen dump? When you get one (or if you already have one), please send it to me (PM is ok). I'd like a raw dump in a format like PIC or BMP, as produced directly by a screen capture program. JPGs can be problematic, since they can have artifacts because of the lossy format.

Second question: did this work OK in earlier versions of EmuTOS, or is 0.9.12 the only version you've tried?

Third question: is this on real hardware or an emulator? Are you running a ROM (.img) or a .prg version of EmuTOS?

Thanks for using EmuTOS!
Roger Burrows

[Cosmic Puppet]

Hi there!
I'm one of the EmuTOS developers. Cyprian mentioned on the EmuTOS mailing list that your Notator display was wrong in some situations, specifically the "double colon". So I'm here to help figure this out.

First question: are these shots of the screen (i.e. with a camera), or dumps of screen memory? If they are screenshots, can you get a screen dump? When you get one (or if you already have one), please send it to me (PM is ok). I'd like a raw dump in a format like PIC or BMP, as produced directly by a screen capture program. JPGs can be problematic, since they can have artifacts because of the lossy format.

Second question: did this work OK in earlier versions of EmuTOS, or is 0.9.12 the only version you've tried?

Third question: is this on real hardware or an emulator? Are you running a ROM (.img) or a .prg version of EmuTOS?

Thanks for using EmuTOS!
Roger Burrows

Hi!
They're screen shots using Snapit (Snapit makes Notator freeze also if you go too deep into the menus I have since found.) The zoomed in one was a mobile phone picture.

I have to convert them, they are originally IMG.

I'll go check out an earlier version for you shortly and see what happens. I have an UltraSatan which means I can easily set up test systems.

It's a real Atari STFM running on an UltraSatan. (.prg) It runs without the double colon when I run it from the floppy disk which runs on TOS 1.04

Notator inititially ran slow but the NVDI 5 makes it fly. (Faster menus editors than original) Tried running without NVDI and still double colon.

Thanks for getting in touch. What is your email address? Correction it's PI3 format.

[Cosmic Puppet]

Double Colon all the way back to emutos-prg-0.9.6

Worse from 0.9.7 to 0.9.6

Version 0.9.6 resulted in a crash upon exiting Notator. 0.9.6 and 0.9.7 had a border problem on the top left where things didn't display properly.

Also tried Notator on EmuTos loaded from a floppy disk and still got the Double Colon.

Having done these checks it's apparent that Notator is running the best it has since 2015 so nice work!

[Cosmic Puppet]

Made an accidental discovery on the subject this morning when I had a song file from 2001 open.

I noticed the weird colon issue was missing.

Upon checking I noticed I had omitted the colon on the pattern name.

So...What is actually happening is that EmuTos is drawing a Broken Bar symbol all by itself.

Broken Bar.jpg (61.5 KiB) Viewed 6641 times

So the default looks like this:

PatternColon.jpg (49.26 KiB) Viewed 6641 times

If I delete it with a space:

PatternDeleteColon.jpg (92.8 KiB) Viewed 6641 times

I get this:

PatternWithoutColon.jpg (47.35 KiB) Viewed 6641 times

All patterns have the name "Pattern:" by default. There are 99 in total. By replacing "Pattern:" with "Pattern" in all 99 and saving into the autoload.son file, these will now display "Pattern¦" on every new song.

I like the look of it and it kinda gives you an extra character for naming, since the vertical broken line looks very similar.

[JezC]

@Cosmic Puppet Interesting development!

That might (hopefully) help the EmuTOS team to track it down a bit more easily.

If all else fails, there is still that other dongle to fall back on.

[Cosmic Puppet]

Yeah @JezC

I always thought it some kind of artifact of display.

It never occured to me that it was an actual symbol.

Thanks.

I'm even fixing issues that I thought unsolvable because I'm being so relentless.

My Atari setup has now surpassed my old setup in terms of music.

[Cosmic Puppet]

It's mentioned here:
http://www.deepsonic.ch/deep/htm/c-lab.php

Though this article says he's been contacted and can't remember how he accessed it:
https://www.soundonsound.com/forum/view ... f=21&t=693

Maybe I've fallen for an old April Fool's joke?

Have any of you heard of this?

[anodyne]

Hi again!
Roger from the EmuTOS folks here, still working on your display problem. I saw your recent comments: that's a good clue, once I get Notator running...

In that regard, I got the Notator dongle eventually (took a month to get here from the other side of Canada!) and am now trying to run it on a plain 1040ST under Atari TOS 1.04. However, I get no further than the initial splash screen. I've tried two different copies of Notator (actually I think only the AUTOLOAD.SON file is different), but both just hang there and do nothing. Since the dongle I got is not _known_ to be good, I'm guessing it's defective. Would my symptoms be consistent with that? I'm loading Notator from a floppy, but I assume that shouldn't cause problems.

Any suggestions about what I might be doing wrong are very welcome. You may assume that I know nothing about Notator, have no documentation, am not a musician and have no MIDI gear.