--- title: home of 8bitbubsy | daily.dev description: A portable Fasttracker II clone written in C using SDL 2 has been released as version 2.22. The project is open source with source code available on GitHub.... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/home-of-8bitbubsy-lpp6hqufp twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: home of 8bitbubsy | daily.dev og:description: A portable Fasttracker II clone written in C using SDL 2 has been released as version 2.22. The project is open source with source code available on GitHub.... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/home-of-8bitbubsy-lpp6hqufp og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/lpp6hqUFp.png og:image:alt: home of 8bitbubsy og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # home of 8bitbubsy **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 2 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A portable Fasttracker II clone written in C using SDL 2 has been released as version 2.22. The project is open source with source code available on GitHub. Platform-specific notes are provided for Windows (NVIDIA GPU keybinding conflicts with GeForce Experience), macOS (security permissions and keybinding conflicts), and Linux (ALT+F4/F5 keyboard shortcut conflicts with the OS). ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 2 discussions and 62 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-08-03). **TL;DR:** The community is warmly nostalgic and enthusiastic about this FastTracker II clone, sharing rich memories of the demoscene, tracker software history, and vintage audio hardware, with only minor technical quibbles about SDL2 vs SDL3 and historical accuracy. **Sentiment:** 75% positive · 15% mixed · 10% skeptical **The case for** - The clone faithfully recreates FT2 including even the snake easter egg, delighting longtime users. - MilkyTracker and this clone together keep the FT2/XM ecosystem alive on modern hardware. - A VST plugin port (ft2-plugin) lets users integrate the tracker into modern DAWs. - The project has been in active development since 2019, showing long-term commitment. - The author also maintains a ProTracker clone, rounding out Amiga-era tracker preservation. **The pushback** - The project uses SDL2 rather than SDL3, which some find an odd choice given SDL3's availability, though the project predates SDL3. - The original FT2 Turbo Pascal source code has never been publicly released, limiting historical study of the codebase. - sdl2-compat shim used by some downstream packagers introduces subtle bugs for SDL2-based projects. **By community** - hackernews (positive): Commenters are overwhelmingly nostalgic and appreciative, diving deep into demoscene history, tracker lineages, and vintage sound card lore with evident enthusiasm. **Hottest debate:** Whether FT2 or ImpulseTracker was the superior tracker in the late-90s demoscene was described as a 'hot topic' at the time, with commenters still divided on lineage and replay fidelity. **Open questions** - Why does the project still use SDL2 instead of SDL3, and is a migration planned? - Will the original Turbo Pascal source code of FT2 ever be released by Vogue and Mr H? - Is there a reliable source for the FALL1.MTM ('Powerplant') file from the One Must Fall 2097 soundtrack? **Highlights** > 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. > — [Benanov on hackernews · 3 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49145973) > 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. > — [Teknomadix on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49147592) > 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. > — [SwellJoe on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49147895) > This rocks. Such nostalgia. FT2 was how I discovered anything about music making - I loved the euro dance music I heard on the radio as a 12 year old but had no idea about the scene or how electronic music was was made. PC Format had FT2 plus hundreds of modules on its cover CD one month, I used to love exploring all the random stuff on there and opened it up and my mind was blown when I realised that there was music like I heard on the radio, but you could see all the individual bits that made it up. It took a loooot of messing around to figure out how to do anything of value with it, pretty sure this was before we had internet at home, but it was the start of a life long fascination with electronic music making. So thank you to the author for resurrecting this amazing and somewhat esoteric bit of software! > — [tomduncalf on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49145719) > It's unfortunate that the Turbo Pascal (with inline X86 asm) source code of FT2 written by Vogue and Mr H hasn't been released after all these years. It's so seminal to so many people from that era. If I were to guess, they found the quality of the code too embarrassing, years later - they were kind of kids when they wrote it. I did see that they (supposedly) shared the source with someone on Vogons for the purpose of minor updates/bugfixes. > — [lysace on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49147267) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49094151) · 61 points · 62 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21931792) · 2 points · 0 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Post by @dosnostalgic.bsky.social — Bluesky](https://daily.dev/posts/post-by-dosnostalgic-bsky-social-bluesky-tl121ylth) · Lobsters · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Add DOS platform support \(DJGPP\) by AJenbo · Pull Request \#15377 · libsdl-org/SDL](https://daily.dev/posts/add-dos-platform-support-djgpp-by-ajenbo-pull-request-15377-libsdl-org-sdl-daq5jy6jx) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [SuperTuxKart 1.5 Released with Improved Graphics \+ More](https://daily.dev/posts/supertuxkart-1-5-released-with-improved-graphics-more-vm7kkxvn1) · omg\! ubuntu\! · 60 upvotes · 3 comments - [Master Low-Level Graphics in C: Build a Software Renderer from Scratch](https://daily.dev/posts/master-low-level-graphics-in-c-build-a-software-renderer-from-scratch-ssvj3mayp) · freeCodeCamp · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#open-source](https://daily.dev/tags/open-source), [#c](https://daily.dev/tags/c) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/home-of-8bitbubsy-lpp6hqufp) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"home of 8bitbubsy","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/home-of-8bitbubsy-lpp6hqufp","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/home-of-8bitbubsy-lpp6hqufp"},"datePublished":"2026-08-02T16:41:59.932Z","dateModified":"2026-08-03T00:49:04.339Z","description":"A portable Fasttracker II clone written in C using SDL 2 has been released as version 2.22. The project is open source with source code available on GitHub....","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--58gMhC4P--/f_auto/v1722860399/public/Placeholder%2012","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--58gMhC4P--/f_auto/v1722860399/public/Placeholder%2012","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Hacker News","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Hacker News","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/hn","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/home-of-8bitbubsy-lpp6hqufp","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"open-source,c","timeRequired":"PT2M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Hacker News","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"home of 8bitbubsy"}]} ```