hehe, I can barely remember writing leif rular.
I remember when synergy just started I was desperate to write chipmusic, but there were no tools, and I wasn't a programmer, though I knew what I wanted.
Then Trisound came around, and I used that for a while. I had an experimental phase where I wrote all these simple tunes with digidrums, just seeing what I could do with it, and creating my own digidrums.
I found that with some sampling of my hardware synths and careful eq'ing I could get some nice (for that time anyway:P) 4-bit samples.
That was the time leif rular was made. All those tunes from that time are pretty basic.
But I reached the limit of trisound pretty quick. It also had a bug in the frequency table. and I hated the fact that I couldn't do proper noise drums, as you couldn't change the noise settings every vbl.
So chipmon 1 was born, which was basically a replay routine based on trisound with some added features that BAT wrote.
We used that for a while, until again, it became apparent that every new feature was a drag to implement. BAT did a rewrite at some point of the soundroutine to make it quicker; at some point the replay routine was almost completely changed while still using the trisound ui..but we'd reached a limit.
Then I decided we should just write our own editor and soundroutine (which became chipmon2).
So I designed a new soundroutine, which BAT coded from the ground up.
When i designed it I mean I basically wrote down 'this is what it needs to be able to do every vbl'....Bat did the coding along with Rapido who gave his input.
Rapido figured out the tmfx stuff together with BAT, although I do believe it was inspired by that ziggy hidden demoscreen.
Rapido figured out a really quick way of doing it and calculating it in realtime; the bat optimised it by putting the frequency calcs into a table.
I'd been experimenting with various basic programs to be able to write my ow editor..and I decided on STOS

(big mistake).
Stos was great for putting together a UI, because of the sprite controls and easy gfx routines. But it was extremely shoddy coding wise.
Since Stos wasn't quick enough, BAT ended up writing me loads of replacement routines for quick 2 plane block routines and a text routine.
I was interested in writing the best tracker GUI for chipstuff out there and it took me over a year!
I also hadn't noticed that it would stall occasionally on an internal garbage collect..on my 4 meg ste that never happened, but on a 1mb machine it happened every few minutes!:)
I used chipmon2 on the synergy megademo and crapman...and by that time the atari era was already fading into twilight...
The idea was to release chipmon 2 after the demo, and I do have a working version somewhere on my old hd (no idea where that is though).
However, synergy kind of disbanded not long after; everybody got jobs or started studying and/or moved away.
I might be tempted to turn out another chip tune some day..just for the cluck of it !
Cheerio,
joris