New Stuff For Old Stuff :: Blog

T his weekend I've tried a different approach to writing and recording a song and it's worked out so well I thought I'd make some notes here about the process. First of all, here's the finished music. I only spent an hour or two actually writing it. That was in itself an exercise in composing but I wanted to try this new method of recording and just got something down to work with. I like it a lot and will definitely expand it. All sounds here are produced by the C64, albeit one fitted with an ARMSID (set to 6581). Only because my working C64 with a real SID chip is playing up. Rather than try to write for 3 or 6 voices and then import that information to end up with a .prg that will run and play the music (aka a "sid") I've written any number of parts, with up to 3 voices in each, and used the C64 as a MIDI instrument, sending each part as MIDI to the computer and recording the audio that comes out of the computer. I think that Logic and other...

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...