Humble restart
It's been a while since I was able to work on Pro/Retracktor. The time since my retreat to Sweden was littered with unexpected chores, sickness and client work that kept me from ever looking at the Protracktor source. Today I was able to finally take a look at it again and figure out where I stand and what to do next.
And while I was reading code and listening to some mods, I realised that I never tackled stereo separation. The original Protracker on the AMIGA had 100% stereo separation because it was based on the four digital hardware channels where two of them would pan hard to the right and two of them pan hard to the left. This is often not exactly what you want (And Retracktor will definitely have free panning per channel), and so most player routines allow you to gradually adjust stereo separation from zero to 100%.
It took a tiny refactoring of the player code to enable stereo separation but I got it done within around 30 minutes which is nice because it shows me that I haven't forgotten everything about this code base.
If I get to more stuff in the near future, I'll run some experiments on how to structure UI code with SDL so that I can start building a simple visualiser for the modules as a first step to a full fledged Protracker editor.
I'm really happy to be back on this. Here's to hoping I will find a bit more time for it.