Hey everyone, some of you may already know it, but Deflemask is no longer free.
Which means you can still get the "Legacy Version" for free, but none of the newer updates.

https://www.deflemask.com/buy_benefits
https://www.deflemask.com/get_legacy

Apart from the fact that i personally think you shouldnt pay money for this tool because its known to have a lot of UI bugs and export issues, it makes me wonder how we should handle the BotB-format now.

botb formats should always be free to access for everyone, which means noone should have to buy deflemask to create or play entries for this format. because im not entirely sure if the newest version adds (or will add) new features that wont work in the Legacy defle version, my personal take on this is that the paid version for defle should be completely banned for entry submission.

everyone is free to pay for it and to use it for formats like sgen, pce etc where u submit rom-files or .vgm, but the deflemask-format, where u submit .dmf should be for the legacy-version only.

because of this, i suggest to rename the format to "Legacy DefleMask" or something like that and to change the rules of the format accordingly to only allow .dmf submissions made with the latest legacy version or older, to make sure everyone is able to play back the files without having to pay for "the best chiptune tracker tm"

I don't begrudge them getting money for good tools (ASEPRITE did something similar a while back and I happily shelled out), but yeah, I agree that BOTB formats shouldn't require paid tools, and like you say, I don't think defle is really polished enough to ask money for, even if it does cover a lot of ground in terms of systems etc.

Damn I just made decent progress in deflemask not knowing deflemask is not free anymore

Honestly I'd just retire the format entirely until this situation is either sorted out, or until some other solution can be found.

Trust is one thing, but I can only imagine someone new to the site writing a whole song in the latest paid version, not knowing what the legacy part means, thinking it'll be fine, and then suddenly it's not fine. They wasted their time (which they may not have a lot of), and don't want to bother rewriting. Technically it's an illegal entry so it gets voted low, and they get up in anger and probably leave, maybe spreading bad mouth about the site.

It's hypothetical, I don't expect it to happen, but it can. Unless the new version uses an entirely different format to differentiate, or there's steps in place in the submission front to prevent new-version DMF's to be submitted, I think it should be retired.

Doubly-so because new Apple devices that have the latest Mac OS version will not run the old legacy version at all. Wine is not an option because it has a lot of trouble with OpenGL software (which Deflemask is)

-:----------------------------------:-
Irrelevant to format discussion but I have thoughts to say:

May be mean-spirited to say this, but I don't think Deflemask deserves more attention than it has, considering the creator hasn't really made it because they wanted to see a good tool for the formats it supports right now. All of them are riddled with bugs, the UI engine is riddled with a lot of bugs too.

If a good tool was in mind, they would've focused on one machine, polished it up and made sure it works as well as it can, and then move on to the next. Maybe we'd only have like 3 machines because of this, but that's fine. There's already so many tools for a lot of the machines on display, I personally don't really need more (that's arguably worse).

I don't mind the fact that a previously-free program goes paid. I don't even care that it's in the chiptune-space where there's an ethos of "sharing is caring", people deserve to make money.

I do mind when said program has pretty much no care put into it (emulations are broken for a lot of the systems but we sure had time to spare to put anti-tampering code on the mask part itself). I get it for mobile, too - it probably costs a lot of money to keep it up on the app stores, but on desktop? The page mentions people wanting it on Steam, I don't remember anyone asking about that at all.

And, LSDj. It used to be paid! It was also only $1, giving you the option to pay more, and you got access to a really good program, even back then! Nowadays it's free and it's more versatile than ever, if what I'm hearing others do with it is anything to go by. The creator is very attentive to people's feedback, too. More importantly, it had a demo that reflected the program. Deflemask-legacy probably won't reflect the newer versions, especially as they go further and further.

Also, $1 is a lot more accessible to practically everyone, including tax. Deflemask being $15 bars it from being accessible, if I were to go back in my 2016-self for a moment I wouldn't have had the chance to pay for it at all. It would've been too expensive for me, I would either pirate it or ignore it.

(Also, reminder that Deflemask breaches the GPL License by using GPL code (the reSID emulation core, IIRC) and not being opensource itself.)

Reusing so much open-source components — and indeed probably still some GPL stuffs — in combination with an abysmal attitude of the main developer, creates a controversial feeling to me.

I'd like to mention that I don't entirely disallow commercial software (although I think there is a low gain in something as niche as a chuptune tracker, where the community should be pushing knowledge and accesibility forward, not go backwards).
In comparison, I think bazz' SNES Tracker employs a much better practical commercial plan. Also looking at Plogue developing their chipsynth VSTs is much better. To further go about that: David does actually share findings and contribute to the open-source community. I can't really say anything the same of Delek and his associates.

On-topic of the discussion: it would probably be best to not have the Deflemask format be hostable anymore. However, I do think the .dmf will most likely have a version increment for v1.0 project files, so you could hypothetically check for version number at the back-end when submitting Deflemask ZERO submissions (I like that name keffie thx).

if deflemask is becoming a legacy format and noone can host it anymore / it wont get featured in spring tracks anymore, botb would frankly position itself against deflemasks paywall. the question is if thats what puke wants.

honestly i dont even know why we have a deflemask format. is there anything deflemask can even do that can't be done in the individual formats it supports? i guess with the exception of ym2151 but that should be its own botb format imo

i mean, i think we should keep legacy despite the bugs and what not. if shit like pandatracker is a format, why not other broken, terrible software? i do feel like either way (delete format or legacy only), this may create a bit of a schism between botb and defle communities tho. that said, sinc-x makes a good point. tmk there's nothing defle format really brings to the table vs like wildchip, except mandating terrible software

leave pandatracker out of this, unlike deflemask its a unique tool with unique sounds that was made for this community and is a part of its history D:

@peshti: don't worry, knowledge obtained in one tracker can easily be carried over to others!

imo, before actually deciding anything, we should wait to see if "paid deflemask" modules work on the legacy version; if so, then its no different of something like renoise (although there's no guarantees that it'll stay that way forever, so it might still be a bad idea)

assuming the worst of scenarios (v1 stuff only works on v1), what should be done imo is:
* rename format to Deflemask Legacy/ZERO (and update lyceum accordingly);
* do NOT remove the format;
-this'll probably cause a lot of issues with existing songs/battles
* allow it to still be hosted on XHBs;
-XHBs are generally communication-heavy so it's an easily controllable environment (in comparison to majors at least), so the scenario that MelonadeM described becomes much less likely
* however, do NOT offer Deflemask format on majors;
-this doesnt require any programming, just to puke7 to not select the format when hosting Spring Tracks or something
* also, do NOT check if the uploaded file is a v1 or v0 dmf;
-deflemask DOES NOT deserve this special attention, puke's efforts are better used in more relevant stuff imo

this saddens me a bit because i legitimately enjoy using Deflemask for Sega Genesis stuff (especially when CH3 is involved), and it has my favorite bug ever ("Increase/Decrease Note/Octave" working in columns that aren't the note one; makes it so much easier to test new volume levels or switch instruments and stuff, this is 100% a bug but i wish this was a feature in other trackers as well). i've made some money with deflemask also, and while i feel it'd be only fair to give back some to Delek, i know that money talks and i don't want to give the message that "yes, I support tools with poor UI, buggy exports and GPL violations". i'll probably keep using the free version tho, but i'm fine with deflemask as a format being discouraged on botb

I'm still working on my x68k toolset sincx I swear lol

I kinda feel like formats make more sense as "what hardware" (Gameboy, nes, genesis, c64) rather than "what tool" (famitracker, defle) in general. Of course it's a different story for stuff like sunvox and pico8 where the tool is the synth. Lsdj is kind of an edge case due to WAV channel softsynth stuff I suppose.

I can't say I've ever actually seen or been in a deflemask format battle. Would removing/legacying it prevent it from being used in, say, agent or Gameboy battles?

@sincx
that's a good point, although ym2151 is a bit unique in this case - how would we implement it as a format?

- do we implement just bare ym2151: as long as it can play on a real one it's fine?
- do we limit it to one system or set of systems in particular? (sharp x68000, sega arcade system maybe? konami arcade system? there's so many choices given that a lot of machines used this chip, even some keyboards like the dx21 and such)?
- do we just say fuck it and relegate it to wildchip categories?

there's a lot of ways to go about that, warrants its own thread though

to get a bit more directly on here: i think deflemask has been a format since like v5 or v6, and a bug in that version allowed you to use multiple, different chips (at least, iirc). that would warrant deflemask being its own format, kinda like how famitracker and 0cc are their own format because it can do similar things.


@2a03fox
at least pandatracker and the wealth of other terrible software are free. deflemask has gone the paywall route now, i'd say wait on it to see if delek backs down but i don't think he will?


@raphael
that's fair for XHB's but to my knowledge there have been very few, if any, Deflemask XHB's, so i stand by what i said with confusion potentially being an issue

as for the increase note stuff, that's a thing in famitracker and openmpt too, it's just mapped to a different shortcut (ctrl+scrollwheel, iirc). afaik it's intended in deflemask too rather than it being a bug

oh yea, DELETING the format was never a thing i was thinking about anyway. more like a solution we have for fakebit format. its blocked from xhb hosting and puke isnt adding it to majors anymore. very simple thing

"afaik it's intended in deflemask too rather than it being a bug" ah i always assumed it was a bug because if you select multiple columns thinking it'll increase/decrease only the notes, it increases/decreases everything else as well, which is not what you'd want. still cool though, thanks for the headsup on the different shortcut for the other trackers

well, i'd suggest removing the deflemask format support itself (.dmf is actually dmfz, you need to decompress it from a kind of gz library from a script for analyzing it and try to make it interoperative, which affects the iterative process with other tools a lot... - perhaps it uses gz for "hiding" the huge chaos and redundancy the default .dmf format is?), mostly for avoiding confusions as well, at least - but perhaps, if people want to use deflemask "legacy" for creating .vgm files for sms, megadrive, pcengine, nes, gameboy, etc., if deflemask doesn't crash before saving or doesn't save anything at all (like happened to me in a battle here recently), might be free to do that, since these .vgm files could be created somewhere else as well?

about deflemask might being better if it could only support one chip or one "system", i don't have the same opinion, i think that editors like deflemask could have a huge potential (and hugely wasted from them, and wasted even more by being proprietary software imho, since we could all help in this whole process) on supporting all chips from vgm format, and even allow us to use whatever and as many chips we want just like we can do on creating .vgm files directly (from scripts (as i submitted some examples of it here in some battles), from hexdumps, from editors that we might want to create, etc.), but deflemask developers with their indeed very narrow viewpoint on focusing on "systems" instead of chips totally destroyed such potential

perhaps this situation might help (maybe with our help somehow?) bringing a cool true vgm software-libre tracker from the software libre community, supporting all chips and all combinations we want (just imagine simple ones, like japanese sms (using sn76489 and ym2413) or "konami-msx" (using ay-3-8910 with k051649) ), that would bring also a motivational "competition", "forcing" deflemask being a "better" tracker (even considering that most of us are not going to use it, meaning paying for its user licensing)

just checked the newest manual and it seems like theres another soundchip added for support, which means its obviously not compatible with older versions of defle, if someone uses this chip to make their entry!!

ouch D:
also, re: "solution we have for fakebit format" -- i didn't know that was a thing that was implemented already, yeah that could be applied to deflemask as well now since it (hopefully) won't require much effort from puke's part

I'll admit I don't have enough interest in Deflemask to use the paid version. I gave it a few experiments here and there over the years, but ultimately my interest proved insufficient.

I'll wish it good luck in its future endeavors, though.

I'm done with Defle and will slowly abandon it. I was quite excited to be able to play around with the NeoGeo system, but having a paywall in front of it is simply upsetting... Time to actually give MML a chance. I'm gonna need to find some help to learn it though...

Oh well, was about time. I've pretty much abandoned it since the instrument-bug in my latest sgen-XHB entry in hope of a new substitute showing up

@RazerBlue6, MelonadeM about the reSID stuff, etc: https://vice-emu.pokefinder.org/index.php/Hall_of_Shame#Deflemask (see the RESOLVED-header) Good news, seems like they've started using their own engine. Wonder though if it's all of the "open-source"-stamped parts...

Still the loved-hated program because of it being the only software of its kind but terrible

"this may create a bit of a schism between botb and defle communities tho"

The paywall created the schism, this is us dealing with the ramifications.

The (now legacy) MAME FM emulation is licensed under GPL as well I think

Oh, wait! I just realized bintracker is out there! I've already given it some of my support for the SPC part. Perhaps it can do something more in due time...

@KungFuFurby how fine it compiles and runs? i didn't try yet

alright
big ass fucking rant incoming
i'm gonna get mad and i'm gonna make people mad and it's gonna be ugly but someone has to fucking say it

this is something i've pretty much expected to happen since the mobile version's release. while it is true that stuff like sunvox mobile and fl mobile are also priced when it comes to their mobile variants, it's not necessarily fair to say that they're in the same situation as deflemask mobile. for one, there was already an alternative, albeit niche, mobile version in the windows ce version and, even then, sunvox isn't a program whose concept is really all that well suited for mobile (so is deflemask doe but more on that in a bit) so it's forgivable on that front. for another, fl is already known to be a program that you had to cough up [a sizable amount of] cash for so expecting the program to be paid as well is standard.

deflemask was, is, and always will be a project i've had no faith in or take seriously. it's something that's been sprout ever since i've experienced the bugginess of it all and how it was closed source and had these bugs for a good long while, it's something that's grown with the mobile version's release and it's something that's now at it's apex with this decision. delek has, somehow singlehandedly, shown to everyone that he does not care about making a good product or being a constructive cornerstone of the chiptune community, making a tool for the benefit of others.

he's an lazy, ego-centric, average-at-best programmer who's concerned with 2 things: clout and cash. anything else? any passion behind his work that he's been working on for over a decade at this point? any love towards the people who use and have used deflemask over their career? any signs of progress towards fixing the numerous bugs his program's had and towards making it the ultimate chiptune device -- the fl studio of chiptune trackers?





well
i made it
and i added neo geo

give me money
lul

- probably delek



needless to say, i'm pretty pissed at this. not because delek finally shows his true intentions with deflemask or that deflemask isn't the end-all be-all chiptune tracker but because now the only relatively good means at creating sgen besides mml is now blocked behind a paywall, and a pretty succulent one. quoting mel here:

Deflemask being $15 bars it from being accessible, if I were to go back in my 2016-self for a moment I wouldn't have had the chance to pay for it at all. It would've been too expensive for me, I would either pirate it or ignore it.

- mel

exactly. for example, as i am right now i don't have a good means for paying for anything AT ALL. i plan on opening a bank account and concurrent paypal in the summer, when my seasonal job is in full swing, but OOPS IT'S NOT SUMMER NOW IS IT? WHOMP WHOMP, HAVE FUN WITH LEGACY DEFLEMASK THEN!!

for the record, this isn't me entirely bitching about me not being able to actually buy software like deflemask. it partially is (being blocked off from software that has been proven to be freely downloaded without charge fucking stings), but mainly i'm more critical about how this will affect the scene of genesis chiptune. with scenes like the nes, gameboy, sms, and c64 scenes, you have a clear alternative. nes and sms has some form of ft, gameboy has nanoloop and lsdj, and c64 has goattracker -- all of which are great programs.

what does the genesis have, or the tg16 for that matter? i mean, there's mml but you don't expect someone to sit down and learn a programming language just to make chiptune, now would you? again, there are a lot of people using trackers, including people like me and 2016 mel who can't afford something like deflemask 1. it's why chiptune has the whole vibe it has in the first place, because it's the ultimate lo-fi broke high school/college student/grad genre due to how easy it is to get into it.

delek has an amazing stash of nerve doing something like this, especially when he already asks people to donate as it is. knowing the fact that bintracker also exists and is gearing up for a release this year, i'm both utterly dumbfounded yet ultimately unsurprised at the actions he's gone and done. for one, it's clearing the stage for bintracker to burst on the scene and make a splash, perhaps with a lot more potential in it than deflemask had when it first released considering it's open-source. for another, it's basically converting the desktop version into the mobile version in another (potentially failed) stint to make cash for delek and the defle team.

whatever the case, it's a complete spit in the face at the whole vibe of chiptune and battle of the bits -- the open-source, communal, friendly, and above all inclusive community of like minded musicians. delek doesn't care about us. he never has and he never will, so i suggest one and only one thing should happen to the format:

retirement.

this format has run its course. through the entirety of the time i've paid attention towards deflemask, not once since i've seen his reaction to obvious and longtime bugs did i think delek was doing it for anything else other than his own profit. this singular action has made that undeniably concrete, and it's better not to give this farce and the clown behind it any more attention. not on botb, and not anywhere else.

alright
that's my rant
sorry i don't usually touch on matters like this this wordy n all but this personally pissed me off
a lot of things were said that i'll probably regret someday
tl;dr: please retire deflemask, it is a clear middle finger to gpl and anything open source and it being an active format on botb now makes no apparent sense given the nature of botb
don't @ me good night detroit

i will say MML isn't really as hard as most people make it out to be, especially if good documentation is around...

stuff like ppmck (nes) and pmd (opn/opna) aren't too hard to get the hang of, you're just typing notes in and then compiling the result instead of a WYSIWYG approach that tracker employ - nowadays there's no real benefit to it other than being a different way to write music, and you'd probably want to mock it up elsewhere first.

there's also MML dialects available for a lot of the format VGM supports, there's AMK (not very good to work with, but produces the best results for now) for SNES, but that's offtopic

point is really try it before you discard it, it's not Too bad

can we just wait? the Windows version of the new deflemask isn't even out yet.

maybe we can separate into 2 formats
like Deflemask (Legacy) or the Deflemask 1.x
idk about the file formats tho cuz seems like they still both use the same .dmf file
or just ditch the format completely for awhile like what Mel said

@melonadem:
ofc ofc, i kinda phrased how i feel about mml kinda wrong tbh so lemme try to atvl correct myself on this

it's not that i think mml is inherently hard to learn or use to make music. i've played with a form of mml (yes i consider fsound a form of mml you type and make things go boop don't judge me) and i will say that it's not hard so long as you know what terms mean within that language. in that sense, it lives up to its heritage of other programming languages and i'd really like to learn it in more depth than just something like fsound someday.

the main thing i'm really nailing down is that programming language aspect of it all. no offense to programmers, i've been exposed to coding for a long time and i've had a deep-seated admiration for programmers. the general point that i was mainly getting at was that others (read: not programmers and also likely not adults) will very likely be scared off by the general concept of mml as a whole and will not take part in formats who's only other alternative is mml because of that.

let me say this much, mml is a helluva godsend for formats with which there is no other way to make music for, especially now that [SEE TOPIC]. not only that, but it's in a form that i'm comfortable working in and enjoy greatly at times! it's just that when i said someone, i was mainly talking about who's getting into chiptune as of now and not people like me who only don't know mml because their adhd really fucking loves the protomen AND steak bentley AND thorhighheels ALL AT ONCE AT THE SAME TIME FOR SOME REASON.

but yea i agree with you there. so long as there's good documentation on the matter, mml can pretty much leave software like defle in the dust. it's just that newcomers are likely to be scared off by strings of code and dismiss it entirely. not certain, mind you -- there are those getting into it who are doing it via their programming hobbies (i.e. homebrew) -- but the likelihood is there.

@a64
yea no, because deflemask 1.x isnt free, which means its not suited to be a botb format and thats the whole point of the thread.

this thread probably went too much into the direction of just attacking deflemask and its developers instead of focussing on what the situation means for botb now.

@djmax sure we can wait, and i hope things develop in a better direction, but with the mac version being out already, and spring tracks being around the corner, i feel like this should be addressed rather sooner than later, because i dont wanna see deflemask files submitted to STX that i cant open with my free version of the tool.

h

Oh wow, didn't see that coming. Not a Defle user myself so I don't have any stakes in this discussion, but... GPL violations or not, Delek has definitely sunk an insane amount of work into this project so generally he's entitled to try and make a buck with this methinks.

Since a number of people mentioned bintracker though, I should perhaps clarify a few things about that. bt isn't intended to become a Defle replacement. In fact, until now I've been actively avoiding duplicating Defle's efforts, as in, bt focusses on those platforms/engines that Defle doesn't support. Now, this new situation might give some incentive to tweak priorities a bit :o Especially stuff like FM is still a long way off, though.

Generally things are also moving along slower than I hoped. As some of you know my partner and me had some pretty drastic life changes last year, so now all of the sudden we're running a homestead with the aim of becoming self-sufficient to a large degree in a few years. And needless to say, that eats even more of my free time than I had anticipated. That said, I still have hopes to get the first beta release done before summer. Pretty sure it'll be bug hell though :o Either way, a friendly reminder that I could definitely use some help for the project. For example, if someone could figure out how to build bt on Windows, that'd speed up things quite a bit re: beta release! If anybody is up for helping with that or anything else, hit me up on https://bintracker.org/contact/ .

Ok, enough thread hijacking.

@charlotte That's actually a very self-explanatory thing to change the name too, although there's a few more things that bother me even if we change the name:

1) if/when Delek decides to make proper, demo-versions of the latest paid versions, we will need a way to differentiate between THOSE and the last completely free version.

2) if the above happens, there's no telling that Delek won't just outright take down the last legacy version from hosting. He's already broken the promise of this software being "forever free", I can see him breaking the promise of leaving the legacy version alone.

Those can be pretty easily fixed by hosting the latest legacy version off the deflemask site, like on someone's Drive or whatever? It's already done for a few other formats here, however the difference there is that it's not the only way to write music to those formats. For DMF, it pretty much is.

However, as I iterated before, problem 3: New MacOS versions will NOT run the latest legacy version. I don't imagine we have a lot of Mac users here, however the few that are here are permanently barred from actually entering DMF's.

So, considering all of the above I'm still bordering on just retiring the format entirely, until some solution gets worked out from Delek. He has made his bed, now he's going to lie on it.



@irrlicht It's not just that "someone decided to make a free tool paid", I'd reckon if Deflemask was actually decent and Delek was a more down-to-earth person, EVERYONE would actually be fine with it. This discussion on whether to remove the format would still happen, however it wouldn't have this many people dogpiling on him.

The problem is: He takes emulations, some of which he doesn't follow the licences for, implements them improperly (driver-wise), works out whatever kinks people report (if he wants to), then claims it's good. It... used to be a lot worse years ago, when he outright attacked people criticizing the software for not being good. Eventually he listened, but given that this is happening, I don't think he's really changed much...

Conversely, David from Plogue takes his time to reverse engineer the inner workings of the chips he's working with, then publishes his findings to the greater community (for free!), he's active in a few places trying to talk to people about this stuff, taking in feature requests and bug reports if any occur, and generally he's a very pleasant person to be around with.

Hell - he even makes like hour-long documentaries on the challenges he had to face when making the Chipsynth products, and I find those really fascinating because it's presenting things I never considered when it comes to emulation.

Delek doesn't do any of that. I don't expect him to do everything David does, but at least SOME parts of it that are arguably not difficult. Open-sourcing is probably the easiest thing to do, IMO.

Aseprite is open-source too, yet many people still buy it because very few people are willing to go through the trouble of compiling it. I'd reckon the same case could be proven for Deflemask.

Anyway, don't want to steer this thread even further. If we want to discuss this further, perhaps let's consider making a healthy-discussion bulletin about it, separate fromt his.

there's always the Internet archive too. I believe the last free version is uploaded on there alreaady

but my spring tracks :U

#FreeDefleMask

deflemask is not a software worth freeing

Geez Yung xD hahaha


But on this note, before any decisions are made, may I host a series of ohbs, so as I may claim this badger, while it still circulates?

As Mel says, this may become an issue due to new folk entering and not realizing that Botb does not require you to pay money to use trackers or any such tech, but while this is still fresh, that would leave time to run some final battles, before deciding on this becoming a legacy badge, in the same vein as fakebit.

Whatever happens, pleasue keep badge :) I like a botbrs accomplishments to remain on site indefinitely.

Edit: I personally don't believe the format should be retired until the point where the defle devs are restricting use of the free versions (which doesn't sound like that's the case right now?)

Seems a lot like Renoise's situation to me, at least in present. Hopefully devs don't smash the hammer on the free versions in the near future.
A name change would potentially be useful.

i hope someone's archived all previous versions too, not just latest free version

older versions had the mobile fm sound chip as a system option and its Gone.

(older version also had Fancy Multichip Trikks, i'll need to see if the latest legacy version can still do it)

quick google search returned basically nothing.
im curious if botbrs here have older versions saved on their hard drives. would be kinda cool to have an archive of releases, also because it seems like some older .dmf probably not open in the newest version or sound different? lol
((maybe an idea to create a new thread for this hmm

-> new thread: https://battleofthebits.com/academy/GroupThread/27869/

closing this one because i think the discussion is over and the issue is solved. deflemask is blocked from xhb hosting (at least for now)