MUSIC of DAWN by DEXION (REWORK) - Notes on Changes/Fixes made.

I had this disk sent to me back in 1990 and I've not seen it anywhere online.
The fourth track never worked. At the time, I thought it was due to only
having 512Kb in my A500. Time passes ...make that roughly 32 years and I went
looking for this disk. I never could find it, as the label was blank. This
weekend (Sat 19.03.22), I grabbed a few disks from a diskbox which needed to
be cleaned (Diskrot) with Isopropanol and as if by magic, this happened to be
the first disk! My search was thankfully over.

Track 4 was damaged and it couldn't be recovered. Luckily, JON of DEXION had
left file comments on each file, so I was able to hunt down the original
module. I then used 'SoundTracker Utilitie' by GIGICAR to turn the .STK file
into an executable.

I depacked one of the other tunes to determine the packer used was TetraPack
2.1, so I proceeded to locate that tool.  After a few minutes familiarising
myself with how it worked, I made a new file 4, paying attention to make use
of effect $01 for the depack copper effect.

Track 5 did not use colour $0182 for decrunching, which resulted in me having
to depack the file and re-crunching it, with the sole aim of correcting this
irksome glitch in the matrix.  I remapped the colour palette of the menu and
added the hidden decrunch text.  I also cleaned up the DEXION logo and the
menu text.

Another odd thing about the disk, is the fact that the Protection Bits had
been set to '---A----', which made copying the files problematic on Workbench
3.1 and these settings impacted loading too (but not on Kickstart 1.x). So,
I have set these bits to '----RWED'.

As for the 'CREDITS', I've identified the five remaining unknown musicians.

 F2 - Captain Fizz (Ray Norrish aka NZO).
 F4 - Based Away (No.1).
 F5 - Crack of Dawn (Romeo Knight).
 F6 - Cover Me (Master Blaster).
 F7 - Smooth Criminal (Oliver Van Liempt).

One other thing to note, is that the menu uses a disguised version of the
'LOADSCREEN' command and this is known to lose focus between the menu and the
CLI screen upon exiting a track.  At this point it is far easier to just
reboot before selecting another track ...and then I had a idea!

I decided to code a menu screen instead to overcome the problem above.  The
trouble is, none of the executable music files would work with it!  I then
remembered that the files needed 512Kb to run and that's when I thought I'd
extract all the tunes, which were in 'Old Soundtracker' protected format.

I decided to look for a tool that could make executable modules, as my replay
rountine didn't play them correctly.  I couldn't locate my module converter,
so I decided to use 'Mod Processor' for the task.  Only one problem ...it
needed the user to press both mouse buttons to exit a tune.  Bah!

Anyway, I loaded up one of the files into 'Mega-Mon' and quickly found the
code that checked for both mouse buttons and proceeded to add NOP ($4e71)
commands to get rid of the right mouse button check. I used the wonderful Hex
editor by Nicola Salmoria, to modify 10 bytes at $150 bytes into the player.
I then packed the files making sure to utilise colour $0182, which was used
for the hidden 'DECRUNCHING' text, so you get some visual feedback whilst
the file decompresses.

N.B. - To stop track playback, 'hold' the left mouse button.

Lastly, there is a text file named 'CREDITS' on the root of this disk which
was writtem by Jon of DEXION, with some additional information.

Regards

Motion/ARTSTATE (08.11.25) · artstate@protonmail.com