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Martin Galway's music source files from 1980's Commodore 64 games

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Re: Martin Galway's music source files from 1980's Commodore 64 games

#21

Post by badc0ffee »

talideon wrote: post #18
layer8 wrote: post #17

Presumably the music wasn’t developed in form of these source files, given that they exceed the size of C64 RAM.

I'm not sure about Ocean, but a lot of companies used the Tatung Einstein, itself a 64KiB machine, as a development platform. I would assume that the software used for building this stuff was able to deal with source files larger than the machine can hold. They might've moved onto the likes of Atari STs, IBM-compatibles, and Amigas by the time Wizball was released though. Plenty of music was developed in the form of…

There's always another 80s computer I'd never heard of...

The Tatung Einstein was released in 1984 in the UK, was kind of MSX-like architecturally, and used the same 3" (not 3.5") floppies as the Amstrad CPC.

I'm curious what US-based C64 devs would have used. Probably not this machine?

Re: Martin Galway's music source files from 1980's Commodore 64 games

#23

Post by trinsic2 »

talideon wrote: post #6
ncr100 wrote: post #3

Q: have people attempted to translate this into Tidal Cycles, or Strudel JS? (Pattern playing of music by notation) Edit: AI says doing the translation would be hard, though doable. https://claude.ai/share/65c16d60-5d27-496b-96a7-40959e95ac62 Edit 2: here is an AI translation of some of the notes, what Claude claims as the main melody: https://strudel.cc/#Ci8vIFdpemJhbGwgIklucHV0IE5hbWUiIC0gbWFp... .. uh ... Edit 3:…

That sounds nothing like any of the Wizball or Game Over tracks, I'm afraid.

Thanks for that. The Laboratory Background riff sounds a lot like versalife[0]

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF09vGckSAc&list=PLKkxnBwFOJ...

Re: Martin Galway's music source files from 1980's Commodore 64 games

#24

Post by golem14 »

Props to Martin Galway to make this available to the public. I wish this were more common. I.e. writers could insist on a contractual shorter copyright period when negotiating with publishers.

Then again, I don't know how much authors earn on books after 10, 20, 30 years. It probably varies, the JRR Tolkien estate and K.K Rowling probably see still very significant income streams. It could still be a good strategy for lesser known authors.

Re: Martin Galway's music source files from 1980's Commodore 64 games

#25

Post by egypturnash »

badc0ffee wrote: post #21
talideon wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about Ocean, but a lot of companies used the Tatung Einstein, itself a 64KiB machine, as a development platform. I would assume that the software used for building this stuff was able to deal with source files larger than the machine can hold. They might've moved onto the likes of Atari STs, IBM-compatibles, and Amigas by the time Wizball was released though. Plenty of music was developed in the form of…

There's always another 80s computer I'd never heard of... The Tatung Einstein was released in 1984 in the UK, was kind of MSX-like architecturally, and used the same 3" (not 3.5") floppies as the Amstrad CPC. I'm curious what US-based C64 devs would have used. Probably not this machine?

From what I’ve read it was not at all uncommon to have a MS-DOS machine that assembled your code much faster and spat it into the c64 over a parallel link.

Re: Martin Galway's music source files from 1980's Commodore 64 games

#26

Post by crq-yml »

flopsamjetsam wrote: post #19
talideon wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about Ocean, but a lot of companies used the Tatung Einstein, itself a 64KiB machine, as a development platform. I would assume that the software used for building this stuff was able to deal with source files larger than the machine can hold. They might've moved onto the likes of Atari STs, IBM-compatibles, and Amigas by the time Wizball was released though. Plenty of music was developed in the form of…

> Plenty of music was developed in the form of source files. That's fascinating. I came in during the Amiga era, and everything was SoundTracker etc. files. I had no idea that music was hand-coded like this.

Some of the sound drivers would be paired with a machine code monitor, and therefore you could interactively develop by modifying hex bytes, which when you think about it, is basically the prototype for a tracker workflow.

There was definitely a tendency to do "compose on the piano, then arrange" with a lot of the early chiptune workflows though. With Galway's stuff there is more reliance on proceduralism to get those long evolving sequences, something which is actually easier to access when it's built from source files and you can define rhythms, chords, dynamics, modulation as forms of indirection.

Re: Martin Galway's music source files from 1980's Commodore 64 games

#27

Post by ekianjo »

golem14 wrote: post #24

Props to Martin Galway to make this available to the public. I wish this were more common. I.e. writers could insist on a contractual shorter copyright period when negotiating with publishers. Then again, I don't know how much authors earn on books after 10, 20, 30 years. It probably varies, the JRR Tolkien estate and K.K Rowling probably see still very significant income streams. It could still be a good strategy fo…

JRR Tolkien still makes money from copyright but sadly can't write books anymore. The whole absurdity of copyright law.

Re: Martin Galway's music source files from 1980's Commodore 64 games

#29

Post by MagerValp »

layer8 wrote: post #17

Presumably the music wasn’t developed in form of these source files, given that they exceed the size of C64 RAM.

It wasn’t, but somenpopulqr assemblers that ran on the C64 used tokenized text and could fit quite a bit in ram.

Re: Martin Galway's music source files from 1980's Commodore 64 games

#30

Post by talideon »

trinsic2 wrote: post #23
talideon wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds nothing like any of the Wizball or Game Over tracks, I'm afraid.

Thanks for that. The Laboratory Background riff sounds a lot like versalife[0] [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF09vGckSAc&list=PLKkxnBwFOJ...

Hah! I never noticed that, but you're right!

For those interested in how the Wizball soundtrack should sound, the best place to go is DeepSID: https://deepsid.chordian.net/?file=/MUSICIANS/G/Galway_Marti...

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