Frequently Asked Questions
Features
Can I do X in Bintracker?
The answer is probably yes, though it might not be convenient do to so (yet).
Which platforms will be added next?
Probably some Commodore computers.
Will Bintracker support FM chips?
Yes, this is planned, but will not happen soon. Especially OPL2/3 support will require a lot of work. Meanwhile, consider VGM Music Maker, Furnace, or AdlibTracker II.
Any plans for Android/iOS support?
Not yet. We may support mobile devices some day but not in the near future.
Usage
I'm using a French/German/other non-standard keyboard layout. How can I change the key bindings?
Go to your Bintracker folder, and open the file config.scm from the config subfolder in a text editor. Find the line that says ;; (load-keymap "en"), remove the two semicolons, and change the "en" part to "fr", "de", or whatever layout you use. See the keymap subfolder of the config folder for a list of available keymaps. If no suitable keymap exists, you can derive your own by copying one of the existing keymaps and editing it.
Sound is choppy and/or lags. What to do about this?
Try adding "-nofilter" "-nomax" to the list of MAME default-args in config/emulators.scm. If that doesn't help, another one to try is "-autoframeskip". If that still doesn't help, add "-video" "none" instead. Newer versions of MAME will complain about this, but it nevertheless fixes most cases of bad audio.
Development
How do I enable the MAME debugger?
Add the -debug flag to the list of mame64 command line arguments in config/emulators.scm.
Why are there so many parenthesis?
Yes.
What do those 'ticks and `backticks do?
It's syntactic sugar for (quote ...) and (quasiquote). To oversimplify a lot, quotation is Scheme's means of figuring out whether something is code or data. Normally expressions are considered to be code, and are evaluated as such when the interpreter encounters them. Quoting turns code into data.
Say you have defined the symbol my-number to be 1. Typing my-number at the REPL will return 1, because that's what the symbol my-number evaluates to. Typing 'my-number on the other hand gives you back the symbol my-number, because that's what the expression (quote my-number) evaluates to.
The backtick ` does exactly the same as the tick ', but allows unquoting within the (quasi)quoted expression. A comma , indicates unquoting within an expression following a backtick. So `(my-number ,my-number) evaluates to the list (my-number 1).
There's also unquote-splicing, but you don't need to worry about that until much later.