Welcome to ThomaSite's Amiga Nostalgia Page.

THIS page is dedicated to my very own Amiga nostalgia, mainly caused by a program I wrote - partly with a friend - called "MusicMaker V8".

Once upon a time - it was in 1987 - I began writing a program for the Amiga called "SndEd". For those of you who are not familiar with Amiga-typical abbreviations, SndEd is short for "Sound Editor". The idea was to write a simple editor for creating music, as simpe as the AmigaDOS text editor Ed.

The progam used samples of instruments that could be put together into a melody. This basic system was a revolution on the home computing sound sector, one of the first programs using this technique was called SoundTracker. The tunes were widely used in games and intros and were really revolutionary. The era of digital sound on home computers had begun.

In the beginning, SndEd only supported the Amiga's four hardware audio channels - as all its competitors.

In 1988, my friend Georg had the idea of mixing two channels together and by this provide the user with eight independent audio channels. The development of this technology was hard - very hard, as a matter of fact. The machines were extremely slow and had very little memory, so we were forced to use all sorts of tricks to make it run on standard Amigas. However, we succeeded. MusicMaker became the first program on the market providing the user with eight completely independent 8-bit digital audio channels, and was - not only by its ability to play the mixed channels at different volumes - far beyond Oktalyzer(tm), which had been released only one month ealier that MusicMaker. MusicMaker included a sample-editor, even more powerful than AudioMaster(tm), offering a luxory digitizing program for sampling from analogue audio sources and complex sample manipulation in all possible ways.

Although I in the beginning never had thought about selling the program commercially, due to the enormous amount of time I spent to develope it I changed my mind later and licenced it to a rather large german company. You have to take into account that at that time, the internet simply not existed for the broad public. These days you were a kind of depending on finding a proper distributor that translated and printed the manual, manufactured the floppies and had the necessary international contacts for publishing the program Europe-wide.

The program therefore got renamed to "MusicMaker V8" because the distributor wanted that for what reason ever. They might have thought that "SndEd" is not a really catchy name. Anyway, after I while I got used to that new name for my baby.

Although I had cancelled distribution in 1992, I continued development a while until mid 1993. The latest version - 3.0 - therefore never has been published for a wider public. MusicMaker V8 is now freeware.

So, why am I talking about a program developed about ten years ago?

Well. I made up this page in November 2000 because I was really struck by an attack of serious nostalgia when I found a program capable of playing MusicMaker V8 tunes on the PC. The program I am talking about is DeliPlayer.

Immediately, I began to copy all the tunes I had from the Amiga to the PC - but got disappointed because the version of the MusicMaker V8 player included with DeliPlayer (Version 1.02) was not capable of playing songs in the latest format. So I contacted that genius who had written that goodie and told him I would like to update his player for using all formats ever used by MusicMaker V8. The Amiga fever broke out - again.

For those of you who are interested, I can offer the following downloads from this page:

MusicMaker V8 Disk 1 - MusicMaker V8 installation disk
MusicMaker V8 Disk 2 - MusicMaker V8 main program
MusicMaker V8 Disk 3 - MusicMaker V8 sample library

Updated MusicMaker V8 Player for DeliPlayer 1.02 (Use "Save Link As...")

Tune Pack 1 - Collection of tunes for MusicMaker V8
Tune Pack 2
Tune Pack 3
Tune Pack 4
Tune Pack 5
Tune Pack 6
Tune Pack 7
Tune Pack 8
Tune Pack 9
Tune Pack 10
Tune Pack 11 NEW! Courtesy Matthias Florian Kretzler (AKA Supermatse)

For installing the program on the Amiga, copy and extract the archives either to each a directory on the harddisk or to floppies. Relabel the floppies to the respective name of the archive (eg. MM_Instruments) or use respective assigns to the directories (eg. ASSIGN MM_Instruments: dh0:mmdisk1/). Then use the installer contained on disk 1. MusicMaker V8 requires at least OS 1.3 and runs on any Amiga with at least 1 MB of ChipRAM.

The tune packs contain about 60 tunes, some well known to the public, some mainly unknown.

The MusicMaker V8-DeliPlayer should on the PC be copied to "AmigaPlayers" directory inside the Deliplayer directory. Just replace the existing file by the new one. Remember to restart DeliPlayer after this.

The MusicMaker V8-DeliPlayer can be used on Amiga as well since it is written in MC68k assembler. Just replace the old file by the new one.

PLEASE NOTE: The MusicMaker V8-DeliPlayer provided on this page should only be used with DeliPlayer version 1.02. Newer versions might contain futherly updated versions of the player.

Have fun!

-- Added February 14th, 2001:

A nice guy from Germany sent me this short ad he had found in the 03/2001 issue of (german) AmigaMagazin:

I must say I am flattered but feel anyway for correcting the information on MusicMaker given in this article:

• MusicMaker V3 is not 5 but over 7 years old, and
• the program is certainly not useful for creating music for websites as the MusicMaker file format is not supported by any browser available.

Thanks for your attention. /Thomas

Remark: The name "Dire Cracks" was the name of our intro programming group in the eighties. It derives from one of the best bands ever and has nothing whatsoever to do with actual "cracking".