How does FT2 relate to the ScreamTracker?
The latter had a printer port output option that, combined with 10 resistors and 5 minutes of soldering, yielded proper sound on any standalone speaker. In the era of chip tunes and inaccessible SoundBlaster cards, it was nothing short of magic.
* The adapter was a DIY version of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covox_Speech_Thing
As someone who was in the demoscene: FastTracker II was more of a successor to ProTracker on the Amiga than it was a successor to ScreamTracker 3. I say this because I used it for years; if you go by user interface and keyboard shortcuts the heritage is very visible.
That isn't to say that FT2 didn't build upon what ST3 (ScreamTracker 3) did; FT2 loaded ST3 files and played them just fine, as long as they were sample-based and not OPL3 (basically no one used the OPL3 functionality in #trax); and a lot of the concepts were brought along as well; per-channel panning (not the hard LRRL of the Paula) and an option for a Linear frequency table (instead of using the Amiga's). I think ST3 had ADSR envelopes; FT2 definitely does.
There were other trackers about like MultiTracker, which got some use - it had a fairly interesting per-track compression (not just pattern compression) that was transparent to the user. It was the original format for Kenny Chou's (CC Catch) soundtrack to One Must Fall 2097 (which is public domain; if anyone can send me FALL1.MTM {"Powerplant"} I'd love you for days; I only have that one after I converted it to XM and it lost all the panning information, as FT2 does not store per-channel panning information; only per-instrument and per-sample; you can't just set a channel pan and have it persist)
No one was really using .MTM in 1995 onward tho.
ImpulseTracker was a 'proper' successor to ScreamTracker 3, down to how the interfaces looked and the keyboard shortcuts. Both are DOS Terminal / "ANSI" looking. ncurses was a thing back then but this was DOS; but they weren't using it. IT is still around and has been open-sourced and I think SchismTracker is the current flag-bearer fork - unsure.
FT2 vs IT was a hot topic in #trax in the late 90's; most of the cool kids used Impulse but I stuck to FT2.
ModPlug Tracker was the first really successful Windows tracker, it is and was FLOSS, and it's still around, and was a pretty capable tracker in its day if you didn't mind light mode. I think a lot of the more 'modern' module output plugins for GStreamer et al are based off of ModPlug code, but again I can't prove it (there was also the MikMod library/players; and CubicPlayer, etc. Tons of libraries)
MilkyTracker is the spiritual successor to FT2 (down to the keyboard shortcuts!) and runs on pretty much anything modern these days. I got it to run on the OLPC XO-1, which was plenty capable because modules were being mixed on a 486 or so at 33MHz, and the XO-1's Geode was running at 433MHz, which is a good 10x faster. However my biggest problem with tracking on the XO-1 was all the times I'd get interrupted when people would ask me about the computer I was working on...
iirc FT2 also had a "Disney Sound Source" parallel port option but never used it. It did have MIDI output.
FT2 did have a really shitty PC speaker output option, because almost all of them are shitty, and a really good one didn't happen until 8088mph came out. It was capable enough to annoy people around you, but it was also capable enough that a friend and I made some 4/6-channel XM files that used basically square wave samples that sounded decent enough. They're on modarchive, look for Comp Sci Chip Tech, you'll find them.
Gonna add the comment about FT2 vs IT, in the demoscene FT2 was probably favoured a bit more since third party replayers (required for embedding the music into demos) were at least somewhat faithful when it came to .XM modules whilst .IT module support wasn't as good for a long time since IT files had more advanced features (though you could probably export .XM modules from Impulse Tracker if you kept to a subset of the features, but I remember it being a bit of a hit and miss).
FT2 and ST3 were released within months of each other in 1994, so they must have been in development in parallel. It makes sense that FT was primarily inspired by a different Amiga tracker.
There is a FALL1.MTM on the MOD archive, but not sure if it is the one you're looking for.
Tell us about the great Sound Blaster shortage! I thought they threw one after you each time you left a PC parts shop. (Could be a different time period.) The GUS on the other hand...
In Germany this was certainly true, as the local distributor CPS put out their own "Sound Blaster" cards for a while until stopped by a lawsuit. IIRC they were rebranded Aztech sound cards. I had a "Sound Blaster Junior" which I was quite fond of (until I saved some money for a GUS ACE).
Lol, it was a shortage of money, not the cards!
This was in '93 or thereabouts and they were really expensive and through that very sparse where I was.
OK, that I can relate to! :)
Honestly by 1995/1996 or so yeah you could find SoundBlaster cards everywhere and anywhere...but if you wanted a GUS you were basically having to plunk down a lot of cash.
Maybe SoundBlaster being short was a little earlier? I didn't have a PC before 1995, so...
By early 2000 you were seeing a lot of Ensoniq and other sort of "Windows Sound Source" crap in most consumer-grade PCs and if you wanted an AWE32 or AWE64 you had to specify you wanted a good sound card.
Um, no. Let's set the record straight. Creative bought Ensoniq in '98 for just shy of $78 million, so by early 2000 the "Ensoniq crap" shipping in OEM boxes was Creative's own product. The AudioPCI ES1370/ES1371 got rebadged as the Sound Blaster PCI64 and PCI128. Creative had already absorbed E-mu Systems in '93, and the EMU8000 on the AWE32/AWE64 was E-mu silicon. Both of these American sampler houses ended up under the Creative Labs roof, so framing Ensoniq as the cheap alternative to Creative in 2000 is totally backwards. Ensoniq was just the volume tier of Creative's own lineup. You're off on the timeline. AWE32 is '94, AWE64 is '96, both were ISA. By early 2000 those were legacy cards on a dying bus architecture, and the enthusiast ask was a SB Live! with the EMU10K1, or an Aureal Vortex 2 if you cared about A3D and had deep pockets. Specifying an AWE64 in 2000 would have gotten you an obsolete card. Also the term is Windows Sound System, the Microsoft AD1848/CS4231 codec standard, and AudioPCI is not a WSS part. It has its own PCI driver stack with legacy SB emulation bolted on, and it genuinely sucked, ran its wavetable in host CPU and system RAM off the ECW patch sets rather than dedicated hardware, and its DOS Sound Blaster emulation was mediocre compared to a cheap ISA card.
Ensoniq was an amazing engineering powerhouse before the demise. In late 1994 I got an Ensoniq Soundscape, at the time it was the most high-end wavetable card built around their OTTO chip (EPS-16+/ASR10), which I believe was a descendant of the Apple IIGS DOC, and it competed at the time with the Roland SCC-1 and the GUS.
Worth noting that the SID chip in the C64 was also created by the guy who founded Ensoniq, before he went on to found Ensoniq. Good computer audio was invented by Bob Yannes. Ensoniq also made sampling affordable with the Mirage, and built some of the coolest sampling synths of the 80s and 90s (EPS, EPS-16+, ASR-10 were the synths everyone in electronic and industrial music had to have). When a friend in my audio engineering class in college got an ASR-10, it was a moment.
I had a Crystal Semiconductor-based clone card that supported the SB Pro 2.0 features around that time.