Memory Bank Structures

• The AMOS Professional Music player does not modify anything in the bank before the music is played, unlike Soundtracker.
• The number of instruments is virtually unlimited, with a choice of 65536!
• There is an unlimited number of patterns.
• With a little work, you are able to save a lot of space. The same pattern can be re-used by different songs, and may be repeated several times in your Soundtrack.

Music banks stored on disc
The AMOS Professional music banks are saved to disc "as is", with only a simple header.

dc.b    "AmBk"
dc.w    Number_Of_The_Bank
dc.l    $80000000 + Length_Of_The_Bank

Note that $80000000 indicates a CHIP memory bank.

SAMPLE BANKS
All sample banks are loaded in CHIP Ram.

        dc.b    "Samples"             Start-8 Name of the bank
Start   dc.w    Number_Of_Samples
* First we store a list of pointers to the samples in memory
* These are held as offsets from the start of the bank
        REPT    Number_Of_Samples
           dc.l   Sample_XX-start     XX = number of the sample
        ENDR
* Now we store the samples one after the other
* Repeat for each sample
        REPT      Number_Of_Samples
Sample XX  dc.b   "Namesamp"           Name of the sample in 8 bytes
           dc.w   Sampling_Frequency   In Hertz
           dc.l   Sample_Length        In WORDS (real length/2)
           dcb.b  ... samples ...      The actual sample data
        ENDR

On disc, the sample bank is saved directly in the above format. The disc header is exactly the same as for a CHIP DATA bank.

AMAL BANKS
An AMAL bank can hold two separate types of information. Either a list of AMAL command strings, or a recorded series of Object movements for use with the PLay instruction. The bank is therefore divided into sections, as shown below:

The header 
         dc.b  "AMAL  "        Start-8 Bank name, 8 bytes, Ascii
Start    dc.l  Strings-Start   Offset to the first command string in memory
The movement table
* We start with a list of the movement table used by the PLay command
* (NN= number of the move)