tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11278247.post111918215566265845..comments2012-05-08T16:18:56.876+10:00Comments on A Man and his Rant: Game music is w00tJustin Warnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14995847102962013980noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11278247.post-1120485587245343912005-07-04T23:59:00.000+10:002005-07-04T23:59:00.000+10:00I hear you, but for once I can claim to be *much* ...I hear you, but for once I can claim to be *much* geekier still. You see, I grew up with the trusty Commodore 64, and some C64 games had some absolutely <I>awesome</I> music. Its SID chip had three voices and four waveforms (sine, sawtooth, pulse and noise). In order to strike a note you had to program seven different machine registers with an 8 bit value for each voice (two for the frequency of the note, one for the waveform and four more for Attack, Decay, Sustain and Release). I used to do this in BASIC as a hobby. I sucked (but learned a lot. I can almost remember the POKE values even today). There were some magicians who could make it sing. No, really, I mean "sing". As in speech synthesis. Can you imagine a multi level game with animated characters and several synthesised speech grabs in only 48 kilobytes of addressable RAM? There were names that seemed godlike to us then, Martin Galway, Rob Hubbard, all composers who wrote ditties so catchy I have days where I still can't get them out of my head.<BR/><BR/><BR/>...Mind you, I can't get the evil leprechauns out of my head either, and there's only so many bodies you can <I>bury</I> in a suburban yard.<BR/><BR/>Anyways, all I can say is thank god for SID emulators where I can relive the tinny, primitive brilliance of "Thing on a Spring", "Way of the Exploding Fist" or "Parallax" anew.Nathan Zamprognohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18292757767183001630noreply@blogger.com