Crystal Hammer

⏱️Overview

This is the music tracker program I wrote around 2002-2003, in Delphi 5.

It was 800×600 on a 17″ CRT back then, so already 4 screens fit now.

📷Gallery

All screenshots here.

✍️Motivation

I was having fun with Scream Tracker on DOS before, so it felt best for creating music and using only keyboard for that.

I called my program simply the same way, but started with version 6 and increased until 14. Then shorted it to just S and used Roman numerals XIV.

This was such an awesome program to use and look at. Mainly because keyboard shortcuts were customized to what I wanted, and also I implemented many quite useful operations in it, e.g. in patterns editor.

🔍Implementation

It was using GLScene package for Delphi and my colored bitmap fonts from another program (it was the predecessor to Crystal Font), hence so varying and colorful texts everywhere.

By default I also used colored image backgrounds, since pages felt really empty. It even had animated text transitions for title pages text and a toggleable fire animation in corner 🔥.

But it was complete garbage at the way sound creation was done. It simply relied on a system timer event and triggered sound playing from DirectSound buffers. I know, nobody does that for music. I didn’t know any other way to code this then.

Timer was more or less stable, but I had to render very little while playing, mostly empty screen and 1 bottom line of info.

🎵Music

I made about 5 songs with it, more here. Also used it for percussion patterns when we were both playing electric guitars.

Later I was checking out Renoise, but eventually my interest faded away from creating music.