New Stuff For Old Stuff :: Blog

I 'm finding it much easier to write silly tunes for my game than I am to write an actual game for my game. ( see the last post to see how far that's got and why it ground to a halt.) But I like composing and I'm getting my coding kicks from writing the assembly code to play the music  and developing my own app to convert the notation (via musicXML) into the data for my C64 music routine. It's doing repeats now, as you can see. The music you hear in this video is being played by a genuine breadbin C64. Thanks SID.  

T his post is going to combine musical notation, music XML, cocoa programming (objective-C for MacOS) and retro game programming (specifically the music) in assembly for C64. That might qualify this as an extremely niche post, so if you're reading because you're interested in all or some of those things, or if there's some other reason why you'd like to convert sheet music to another format, do let me know if the comments so that I know I'm not entirely alone! In the last couple of posts in this series I wrote about how I was tinkering around with a little tune for a game I'm writing for C64. Writing out the notation is something I'm very comfortable with. I eventually arrived at a great and efficient way to store and play the music within my game. This involved using a kind of 'bytecode', combining instructions and data. (A development of code that came with Derek Morris' book). That looks like this: That looks pretty laborious to wri...