Nectarine

There are some excellent bytebeat tunes from last year's Lovebyte (my personal favorite is Stress Signal by Natt) and I'm expecting there will be more this weekend in Lovebyte 2023.

https://demozoo.org/parties/4378/#competition_16893

Obviously only a tiny proportion of all bytebeat is good enough to warrant uploading. But IMHO the best ones should be rendered and uploaded, and I'd like to see a platform for them. What do you think?

I support the idea (of making a platform for them)

What 'platform' did you have in mind? We could use 4K exe for example, which we already have, or just PC?

I mean the platform name should be "Bytebeat" or similar. Typically bytebeat is javascript that outputs an uint8 for each sample, but there's also javascript-based variants that output int8 or float, and the origins of bytebeat are C programs. Since bytebeat nowadays mostly runs in a browser, the underlying hardware is anything with a browser.

...and 4K is a bit overkill since sizes of bytebeat tunes are counted in bytes rather than kilobytes.

This doesn't seem to be restricted to any particular platform, so I'd be far more inclined to just add it under 4K EXE or add a smaller 1K EXE, perhaps.

Is there any particular characteristic(s) or rules of bytebeat that can be defined that set it apart that are obeyed/understood outside of a single person or single demoparty? That's what we're looking for in a "platform," typically.

A bytebeat program only generates the samples, it does not play music – so is EXE suitable?

That's the characteristic of bytebeat: it's a tiny program code snippet that generates samples. So for example "t*(42&t>>10)" is a classic bytebeat "song", though not very radio-worthy.

MIDI is a platform here too. There are many similarities: both are independent of hardware platforms. Both are mostly a single specific thing: MIDI is mostly a .mid file and bytebeat is mostly a javascript snippet playable in a bunch of javascript players. But if music from a DOSBox demo that plays MIDI was captured, that would still be MIDI even though there's no .mid file. And if bytebeat was written in any other programming language, it would still be bytebeat. A major difference, of course, is that bytebeat has a single exact rendering while MIDI can sound very different depending on soundfonts etc.

Of course we could call javascript the base platform and name the platform JS-bytebeat. Then in theory we could have something like C-bytebeat or JS-SomeTracker later.

Hm, I see your point about it not really being executable music. PC-Other is already too much of a catch-all, IMO, and we have Pico-80 already which is not a real machine. So a Bytebeat platform seems fine to me. Some of those compo entries you posted are pretty cool and certainly belong on the stream!