https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcWqMGju7fk
at about 15 minutes in he plays some music that sounds very tracked with the format .zsm. I am interested to get the thoughts of people here about it. :) the format might be .z8m the font makes it difficult to tell. Either way the specs on the chips are properly documented in the video, so I am interested in the informed technical information that our community here has with this kind of thing. My guess is that the format is similar to the s3m format, but I am very open to corrections.
As the screencap suggests, those tracks were made or at least exported with Furnace Tracker, a multi-system chip tracker. ZSM appears to be a multi-chip register dump format. It's not a tracker format, it just instructs the two sound chips of the system when to change which register (much like DRO or VGM export in OpenMPT for OPL sounds). The source for a ZSM file doesn't need to be tracked. Anyway, that means the format isn't like any particular tracker format, because it's not a tracked format at all. FM is not "tracker sound" - you can make FM noises with any sort of music software, and it was indeed quite common back then that regular MIDI sequencers could use the SoundBlaster's OPL chip for playback.
thank you very much for taking your time to break down what is going on there saga. I appreciate it :)