)( COCO-TRACKER for 6809 )(
                 by John Kowalski (Sock Master) May 24, 1996.

Prepare to be even more amazed!  As of now, something that even I thought to be
entirely impossible on a regular (non 6309) CoCo3, is not just possible but now
an actual reality!

What is it?  It's a MOD file player!  MOD files aren't new, they've been around
for years.  They originated on the Amiga and were pretty much designed around
the Amiga's sound hardware.  Pretty soon there were players for the Atari ST,
and then finally also on the PC and Mac.  All these computers are at least 16
bit, have at least 8Mhz processors and usually special audio hardware.

MOD files have become a sort of generic song file that can be played on many
different kinds of computers, but until now, no 8 bit computer has ever been
able to play them.

Through the magic of creative programming, long hours writing and rewriting
code until it's as fast as can be, and more hours figuring out how to decode
MOD files...etc... (you get the idea), a new technical achievement has been
accomplished.  It's COCOTRACKER - the very first MOD file player on the CoCo.

This version of CocoTracker is actually a port of my original 6309 version.
Because of some breakthroughs that I had with the 6309 version, I've decided
that it could also be done on a regular CoCo3.  It has all the features of the
6309 version, except Orchestra-90 support, and I've eliminated a small aspect
of the video display for speed considerations.  As expected though, the 6809
version doesn't perform quite as well as the 6309 version.  The audio playback
is a little rougher because of the lower sampling rate, and the oscilloscope
runs a bit slower too - but you can speed up the oscilloscope by shrinking
it's size or lowering the selectable sampling rate.   It's pretty much a small
miracle that this can be done at all!

COCOTRACKER is still in development, but it's finally starting to look good!
Out of the many MOD files I've tested with it, it only completely messed
up playing one (it plays, but it sounds all wrong).  The majority of the MOD
files I've tried sound okay.  I'll add better decoding of MOD files in future
versions and hopefully fix playback with any problem files.

Requirements:
 *You NEED a CoCo 3.
 *512K is preferred, but you ought to be able to play really small MOD files
  with 128k of RAM.
 *RSDOS will do, but this makes it hard for you to save larger than 153K MOD
  files.  CoCoTracker now patches vanilla RSDOS1.1 to be able to read 80
  tracks and double sided disks - but you till have to find another way to
  actually SAVE your MOD files in that format.
 *The program boots up in RGB colors, but if you have a TV and don't mind
  funny colors you can still use CocoTracker.

I've uploaded these files to FTP://os9archive.rtsi.com/RSDOS/MODS/

MOD6809.TXT (ASCII TEXT)
MOD6809.BAS (BASIC ASCII)
MOD6809.BIN (MACHINE BINARY)

You'll need to download some MOD files too to try the program out so I'll put
a few of those there too.

Remember to *quickly* read the shareware notice when the player screen pops up.
(The notice only stays on the screen very briefly.)  The idea is that if you
like the program, then please send 10$ to :

                                     John Kowalski
                                     4885 Legion street
                                     St-Hubert, Quebec, Canada
                                     J3Y 1Z3


Enjoy the program.  Please send any comments to Twilight@axess.com

                                       John Kowalski (Sock Master)