M8 Headless tracker

I’ve tried following instructions GitHub - RowdyVoyeur/m8c-rpi4: M8 Tracker Headless Client for Raspberry Pi 4 Model B on my Zynthian as well, but get the following error:

INFO: Looking for USB serial devices.
INFO: Found M8 in /dev/ttyACM0.
INFO: Opening port.
* failed to add service - already in use?

Guessing something to do with GPU / GL driver / Displaying M8 on screen? (I’ve first stopped the Zynthian with systemctl stop zynthian)

Hi @scaus! Welcome to the community!

My Zynthian has port /dev/ttyAMA0, not /dev/ttyACM0.

/dev/ttyAMA0 is the serial port that Zynthian uses for its 5-pin DIN physical MIDI. The service that provides this is called mod-ttymidi so you will need to stop that service, e.g. systemctrl stop mod-ttymidi.

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Hey thanks,

So I tried following things:

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

And then in /boot/config.txt I added following line

# Enable DRM VC4 V3D driver on top of the dispmanx display stack
dtoverlay=vc4-fkms-v3d

Reboot. Zynthian is disabled/stopped. Now there is no error anymore, but still screen is blank when starting m8c

  root@zynthian:~/m8c-rpi4# ./m8c
INFO: Reading config /root/.local/share/m8c/config.ini
INFO: Writing config file to /root/.local/share/m8c/config.ini
INFO: Looking for USB serial devices.
INFO: Found M8 in /dev/ttyACM0.
INFO: Opening port.
INFO: Looking for game controllers
INFO: Trying to open game controller database from /root/.local/share/m8c/gamecontrollerdb.txt
INFO: Trying to open game controller database from /root/m8c-rpi4/gamecontrollerdb.txt
INFO: Found 189 game controller mappings
INFO: Enabling and resetting M8 display
INFO: Reset display

Btw. now when trying to run Zynthian with V3D driver there is also blank screen but you can remove line from config, reboot and it will work again…

Update:
The new driver is actually

dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d

With this I see Zynthian booting on screen :slight_smile:

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DRM VC4 V3D is a display driver that supports use of GPU, e.g. for 3D graphics.
M8C is a tracker with sampler and synth support.
These don’t align with simultaneous with the Zynthian OS. I would suggest that if you want to use the Zynthian hardware to run M8C then you start with a fresh OS image, e.g. Debian or at least disable all custom services so that you have a fairly generic OS without any Zynthian stuff running.

Zynthian has a built-in sequencer. If Zynthian users want a tracker view then we could (possibly) add one that interfaces with the existing sequencer, hence the earlier question about what this might look like, e.g. would the tracker relate to a pattern, a track, a sequence, etc. (Each sequence may contain one or more tracks. Each track may contain one or more patterns. Each pattern may contain none or more notes.)

My point is, what are you trying to do and why? Modifying M8C to run on Zynthian hardware may be something that some people want to do. Good luck - it sounds interesting but probably not something I would get involved with :wink:.

Yeah I know, thanks for the info - will try to play with Zynthian Sequencer ( as I mostly used external sequencer). Since my only Raspberry pi 4 is Zynthian, wanted to see if its possible to use it for other projects especially while travelling (like m8 and perhaps retro games), but still being able to load Zynthian from the same card.

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Hi @scaus

You better have to go with a dedicated SD card for a given project (eg Zynthian testing vs Zynthian stable, piHole, raspiOs -this one is good for testing if a hardware is supported- , libreElec and so on)

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