Velvet Studio 2.01

Back in 1991 a new computer group called Extreme entered the PC scene. At this time the scene around the PC was very small and friendly, and everybody knew each other, unlike the scene around the Amiga. The most famous groups were Spacepigs, Cascada and Codeblasters. Those groups started the scene around the PC by introducing things no one thought were possible on a 286, like panning screens, big scrolltexts, vectorbobs and the like. They also played 4-channel, sampled music through the PC speaker, which was revolutionary at this time, and invented the covox hardware (an easy-to-build hardware to connect to the parallel port and your stereo and then you had great music playing from the demos).

With a burning desire for coding and demo making, Baldric (Patrik Oscarsson) and Zyric (David Broman) entered this new, rapidly growing scene and made Extreme known with a little demo called Wargasm. The demo was in no way anything revolutionary but contained some clever tricks and nice effects.
After that three more intros (Pixtro, Infro and BBStro) were released to inform people about a bitmap handling program called Pixmate, a Sine Creator (useful utility for demo coding) and a BBS.

In winter 91/92 a demo called Technoholic was released. It was quite cool at that time with a bashing techno tune, zooming textwriter, vectorbobs, sinedots, bitmap plasma and a lot more. People enjoyed it and Extreme gained some more members and more fame.

Some time after that Baldric decided to start creating his own music player. He felt that the ones already existing were too lousy, and that it was possible to do it better and play more channels than four. This resulted in a little modplayer called Extreme Player that could play MODs from the Amiga and PC trackers like Whacker Tracker. 

However, after making a few more demos they got a bit tired of it, and at the same time they had many ideas how to improve upon the existing trackers, so in the beginning of 1994 they started planning of an own tracker.
In the first iterations of the tracker the name was Extreme Tracker, but that eventually changed to Velvet Studio, since they figured it was so advanced it was more like a complete studio.

In summer 1996 the final version of Velvet Studio was released. It was heavily promoted for at the demo party Assembly '96 and a lot of copies were sold.

In autumn 1996, the two main coders of the tracker got really busy with other stuff. Zyric started his University studies, and Baldric got a new job at a computer company. There was simply no time for any spare time coding on Velvet Studio anymore. The project was temporarily laid on ice for unknown time.

Then, in spring 1997, Vicious (Pontus Munck) decided that this project was too great to be spoiled. He offered to take over the further development of Velvet Studio and at the same time, Baldric and Zyric agreed that Velvet Studio from now on should be fully shareware, meaning that everyone could use the full version of the tracker for free!

In the autumn of 2013 Baldric found out that the AMS format was still used in plugins for Winamp, and even as a format that the Windows Tracker OpenMPT could read. This interest for the format and the tracker as a whole convinced him to release the tracker as open source.

The code base is about 100 000 rows of assembly code, and took about 2.5 years to finish. Since Velvet Studio was among the first things the duo ever coded, they learnt a lot during the progress, and structuring the code was not the highest of priorities, so looking at the code now is sometimes quite hard. All variables are global, and there's only a vague attempt to achieve separation of concerns.

Turbo Assembler Version 4.0 and Watcom Linker 10.0 along with Pmode/W Protected mode system was used for developing the Tracker.

Patrik Oscarsson, October 2013