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Afaik the Amiga had fairly open hardware esp the Zorro bus which made time sensitive expansion cards like the Video Toaster possible.



It also made home music production affordable for the average person, thanks to Paula[1] which had 4-channel audio playback. It's not a case that all music trackers for Amiga, such as ProTracker[2], had 4 tracks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_Chip_Set#Paula

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eclMFa0mD1c


Oktalyzer had a maximum of 8. If I recall correctly it downscaled sounds on the fly to 7 bits to gain a maximum of four more tracks. Its samples were noticeably worse in quality and less loud, but back in the day I still had a lot of fun using it.

https://www.robotplanet.dk/amiga/oktalyzer/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXTuWQDCylE


Nice, I didn't know about Oktalyzer.

> Its samples were noticeably worse in quality and less loud

I think I get the idea - I remember those trackers for Atari ST that also used some similar tricks to play multitrack audio even though the ST didn't have native multitrack PCM playback[1]. I remember that the sound was worse than ProTracker but still "serviceable" if you get what I mean.

But at the end of the day many ST owners would just use it as a sequencer of external gear (thanks to built-in midi ports and SW like Cubase) - those were actually rich people, they didn't need trackers LOL - my uncle had a Roland sound module and an Akai sampler hooked to the ST! I was just a kid and didn't have money for external gear but I was proud of what my Amiga could do for a fraction of the price.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST#Music_and_sound


StarTrekker also had 8 channels: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=13415


Ahah I love the comments tread in the pouet page, with Exolon replying! Thanks for posting the link.




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