Shellplay v0.71 Copyright (c) 1993 by Brian C Bening Freeware Permission is granted to freely redistribute this work as long as the program and this documentation file remain together and unmodified. What is Shellplay? It is a shell program that plays Amiga music MODules. SP can be used under ORCA, GNO, and ECP-16. Once launched, SP will install itself in the background and return control to the shell; thereafter, any program that does not use the Ensoniq or the Sound Toolset can be used in the foreground. Usage examples: o multple MODfiles can be specified on the commandline. ex: sp after.the.rain bass.o.drums mod.hiv o ORCA wildcards can be used if shellplay was launched from ORCA. ex: sp mod.= o Filenames containing spaces must be enclosed in quotes. ex: sp "mod.Bass O Matic" o Single quotes will force SP not to use ORCA wildcard parsing. This will load one MOD: sp 'mod.===Blue===' o If only one song is loaded, it will continuously repeat. o The options passed to Shellplay are case sensitive. This will clear the playlist: sp -C This will print the current song: sp -c o Options can be separated or grouped together. These are equivalent: sp -C -S100 -V50 sp -CS100V50 Option List: -?: print a brief option summary. -K: stop shellplay and remove it from memory. -ts: guess the tempo method (Protracker or constant) to use by examining each song before playing it. -tp: force SP to use Protracker tempo. -tc: force SP to use constant speed tempo (otherwise known as VBL timing). -t5: use 50hz timing for constant speed tempo -t6: use 60hz timing for constant speed tempo -b: don't follow position jumps. Postion jumps are commands used within MODs to create infinite loops or to hide songs. +b: follow position jumps. -VX: set the volume to X% of the maximum. Where X is between 0 and 100. -SX: use X% stereo. X can be any value between -200 and 200. -S100 uses no channel mixing. This is how MODs are played on the Amiga. -S0 is Monophonic. -S200 uses channel doubling. Sounds similar to -S100; but, it has slightly better quality. +s: skip to the next song. -s: skip to the previous song. -gX: goto to song number X. +r: play MODs in random order. The playlist will be randomized each time +r is encountered and when songs are added to the playlist. -r: play MODS in the order they were added to the playlist. -C: clear all songs from the playlist. -l: print out the playlist. -c: print the name of the MOD currently being played. +H: use hardware handshaking on the modem port. This will confuse your terminal program unless it is set to 8N1. Also, your terminal program will not be able to control hardware handshaking while this option is enabled. -H: do not use hardware handshaking on the modem port. Bugs: o Random crashes... Blah. o While SP is running, Apple DMA SCSI cards may choke when transfering data from disk. This can be worked around by turning off DMA on your SCSI card. o When running on extremely fast accelerator cards, the sound may be grainy. o lots of spelling and grammatical errors in this documentation. Other stuff that may appear in the future: o a desktop version of Shellplay, for those people that do not have or want shells. o the Xplayer (tm) toolset, featuring all of the great features of Shellplay. o Xplayer. A sixteen channel MOD editor (and player). Please, if you have anything to say about shellplay or life in general, send email. My current address is: vacc0001@student.tc.umn.edu