New Stuff For Old Stuff :: Blog

 T his is another performance using my new "MIDI input" music driver.  This is another piece of original Dual-SID music. I've tended to like intros that start simply and build but I'm starting to doubt the wisdom of writing long ponderous intros. I may experiment with form and try something that dives straight in and uses the thin bits in the middle. My 16-channel MIDI to 6-channel SID voice music player is improving. The sound in the video is captured straight from my sixtyclone which you can see in the video. I realised later that I had failed to remove the sound from the separate video footage and so you can hear a faint strange echo and room ambience. The music is actually being generated by Logic Pro on a Mac (I can use anything that generates live midi events) and sent to the C64 via my Datel MIDI cart. This setup is working really well. Composing using the piano roll in Logic is great, it allows me to really fine-tune the length of the notes (or selectively ove

 I 've just discovered this Gem on the 2011 Denial disk. (By Robert Hurst.  Thread discussing its development here . Game available here .) I love Berzerk and this is a very good-looking and very playable version. The software sprites move quickly and smoothly and the sound effects are just right.  What could be better than that? Well the MMX+ version has synthesised speech! Yes, sound samples of the menacing robotic "Intruder alert" type sounds as featured on the arcade game. Coming from a Vic chip. That's blowing my mind.

T his year I decided to rewrite my music driver.  That's going well, and by combining that driver with my ' Knottifier ' which allows you to play the SID via a MIDI keyboard or instrument, I've come up with this. It receives MIDI data via a MIDI cartridge, with up to 16 channels. It allocates a free voice (if there is one), applies whatever sound patch you've chosen for that channel and plays the note. One channel typically carries all of the percussion with each drum being a different note. Some channels such as the piano and guitar here, may play chords, ie more than one note at a time. Canyon.mid is not my music, in case you don't know it. It's very complex, it has around 10 tracks, with multiple simultaneous notes on many of them. This is well beyond even dual SIDs, so I've taken out a number of the tracks and edited down the remaining ones a little. More work on this particular track and my sound patches could improve this rendition a bit. 

R ob Taylor has 'reverse engineered' the C64 board and is selling his modern re-creations. They are truly a thing of beauty. Of course you can use one to replace a bad board in a C64. But you can also use one to build a new C64. Bob still has plenty of boards left in three revisions and various colours .  Why did I start this?   I love using real hardware, just as I have done since '81. There's something about working directly with the actual hardware, a feeling that was lost for me in the 16-bit era, when we became more 'distanced' from the silicon.   I will always have and use all-original machines, they won't sit on a shelf to be looked at. But as a daily-driver, putting frequent stress on those old components bothered me.  We have to make up our own minds about emulation. It has its place for me but it's not the same. TheC64 is only a small step up from there (for me). I held off from the Ultimate and Reloaded for different reasons. After replacing