My computing journey started at the 8-bit era with my beloved ZX Spectrum +2. It was a world filled with games, a bit of BASIC and assembly programming, and... more games. The rest of the software spectrum (pun indented) at the time was educational and business software, utilities, and a few(compared to the sheer amount of games) content-creation titles.

You see, the processing power, memory and storage constraints were such, that creative software was more of a demonstration of how programmers pushed the limits of those poor little platforms. There were certainly exceptions, but it wasn't until the Amiga and Atari ST became affordable enough to be considered home-computers, that content creation software justified its meaning.

When I got my Amiga 500, I initially practiced the art of button-mashing and joysting-waggling, just like any other teenager at the time. And then I discovered music trackers (or mod trackers if you will). I can't recall if it was ProTracker, FastTracker or OctaMED the one I used first. I became fascinated, tried them all and started writing little tunes. It felt absolutely unbelievable to have an entire orchestra at your fingertips. While I'm still gaming to this day, that moment back then marked the end of my eat-sleep-game-repeat days.

Fast forward to now. I did some occasional programming over the years, but nothing too serious. The kind of: learn a bit about programming language X, fiddle with it for a month, forget everything I learned the other day. My latest urge was to finally try to learn some C/C++ and it was my son's fault. He forced me, I'm not kidding. So what do I do with my newly acquired knowledge? That's right: Try to write an ENTIRE FUCKING TRACKER. Needless to say that was too much for me to swallow, so I only got to a point where a barely useful program plays some notes and reads/writes to a simple file format. It looks pretty, but it's ugly inside...

So here it is, a Windows tracker called uTracker. And if you feel like poking your own eye (you've been warned) here's its source-code.

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