Of course, the most important feature would be to get the music that is created in the tracker playing on an actual C64 so that it could be used in games, and fortunately this is supported in the ‘export’ options (the music can be exported in. The other major selling point was the interface – being touch screen based meant that there was no need to learn any commands or shortcuts, and the keyboard and dials for adjusting sounds are all there on the screen making it very easy to get started. The fact that it works on a very portable device was a big plus for me – it would allow for composing C64 tunes virtually anywhere. I found that there were a few different trackers available, some were PC based and some ran on the C64 itself, but the one that really stood out for me was called SIDTracker64 and is available for the iPad. I had used a tracker before on the Amiga called OctaMED, so I decided to have a search around and see if anything like this was available on the Commodore 64. What I really needed was a ‘tracker’, a piece of software that lets you program notes and sounds as complex as you are comfortable with into the channels of the sound chip. This is something I had managed once before, but the routine I wrote was only capable of playing very basic sounds and changing the note, plus it was limited to one different sound for each of the three channels. With the sound effects added, it was time to look into getting some music playing on the title screen of the game. I was really impressed how much more alive the game felt once these sound effects had been added, and it now seems very strange when I play the old version of the game without them – a little like watching a clip of a film with and without the incidental music. This opens up a whole new world of possible sounds with the SID chip and really explained why I was only able to get very basic effects working before. A very useful discovery I made during this experimentation was that the key to interesting sound effects was not just to set up a sound and trigger it, but to change the various values of the sound whilst it is playing. When I was asked recently if I would like to contribute to the Reset magazine cover disk, I thought this would be an ideal time to read up on the SID chip once again and try to add some music and sound effects to RockMaze.Īfter a quick internet search, I found a book with a good introduction to C64 sound here:Īfter some research and experimentation, I managed to get a few sound effects triggering on the various events of RockMaze. I can’t remember if I ran out of time, or if I failed at attempts to get sound effects working, but either way the game ended up being completely mute. This was the case with RockMaze, my first attempt at creating a C64 game. For some games this is absolutely fine (my Snake clone had small noises to indicate picking up, crashing and starting the game, and also a very simple tune when the game first loads), but for other more complicated games it really is deemed unacceptable for a C64 game to not have some cool music and sound effects. When it came to making use of it in my own programs however, I only really managed to get the most basic of sounds working. Over the years there have been many names associated with squeezing excellent pieces of music from the three sound channels of the SID – Rob Hubbard, Ben Daglish, Jereon Tel, Steve Rowlands… Look them up on YouTube if you still need convincing.īefore I started writing my C64 platform game, I had a small amount of knowledge of how the SID chip worked having read about it in various books and magazines. I’m sure at some point everybody has been impressed by a piece of music played by the Commodore 64’s SID chip. You can also read about Pond’s upcoming releases, which include entries for the 2016 Reset 4kb Game Coding Competition, which I would encourage any C64 coders to take part in!ĭetails of the competition can be found here:
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