Weirdest tracker ideas I’ve had

[Amaroq Starwind]

Here are some weird tracker ideas I've had over the years.
- Online-collab tracker: The Google Docs of trackers, essentially. I had this idea way back in 2013, maybe earlier, but I was still in high school. Shame none of the major cloud service providers are trustworthy these days.
- A tracker for on the SNES/Super Famicom: "Oh, like Deflmask or Famitracker, but for making SNES music?" Ha, wouldn't that be great? But my autistic brain decided to overcomplicate it with "how about making a tracker which runs *on* the SNES, like how LSDj runs on the GameBoy?", which would be a logistics nightmare because you'd need to make custom cartridges that feature additional hardware just to make the software somewhat usable.
- A tracker that is actually a game: This is actually my most recent idea... What if you made a sort of puzzle-roguelike using a tracker-style interface, obviously themed around tracker music?

Has anyone else ever had really weird tracker-related ideas like this?

[Saga Musix]

I wouldn't exactly call online collaboration a weird feature, and in fact it has been done way before any of today's popular online collaboration spaces even existed - in Impulse Tracker. I wrote my master's thesis about an experimental online collaboration feature in OpenMPT (which may see a return in an official OpenMPT build someday, we'll see), and there's some ongoing experiments with adding IT's network protocol to Schism Tracker.

[Amaroq Starwind]

I see... I had no idea online collab was a thing in the DOS era.

What do you think of the other two things, though? Are they categorizable as "weird"?

Item #2: Okay, I guess the SNES tracker (for homebrew developers) isn't exactly weird... Relatively trivial on PC, requires removable storage on console, not to mention a sample editor/library. Awesome but impractical (LSDj for the GameBoy can at least be taken on the go).

Item #3: A game disguised as a tracker though, I feel like you can't get much weirder than that. (Others are welcome to prove me wrong, however!)

[Saga Musix]

A tracker on the SNES would be facing pretty much the same problems as LSDj and similar tools, so in the end it's just a question of whether anyone can be bothered to do this exercise, not whether it's possible. It's not any weirder than making a tracker for the Gameboy really.

[Amaroq Starwind]

Hmm... how would one turn a tracker by itself into a game... I think I know a way to do it, design-wise, but I have no idea how to put it in words. This concept calls back to my thread about VLIW processors though: a tracker is effectively an interpreter for pattern data, kinda like a JVM uses an interpreter for bytecode, or a C64 interprets BASIC, correct? And a VLIW processor is basically like those (sorta, it's hardware running machine code, but still), except with multiple channels (like pattern data in a tracker module). A game designer could hypothetically use that as inspiration here.

If you expanded the playback engine of a tracker to support conditional logic while parsing pattern data, you could probably use that to create puzzles, "dungeons", or what have you, which the player must solve by completing the pattern.

Is... any of that actually making sense, or did I just write meaningless word soup? It sounded logical in my head.