Wednesday 10 July 2019

Unused Shmup Tunes Recording

Yesterday, Cosine released 'Unused Shmup Tunes',  a C64 one file demo music selector featuring code, graphics and music by me.  Information about the collection can be found here...

I wrote the music using a PC based tool called Goattracker.  The SID music from the demo has been recorded using a 8580 SID equipped C64c, run through my Dolby amp.

I've uploaded a recording to my SoundCloud account.  Listen to the music below; if the player does not appear, hear it on it's SoundCloud page here...




Tuesday 9 July 2019

Unused Shmup Tunes

Inspired by the music selectors that used to appear on C64 magazine cover tapes back in the day and because I had some unused tunes taking up space on my hard drive, I've (funnily enough) coded up a music selector, released today by Cosine!  It's rather awkwardly called 'The Unused Shmup Tune Selector' or 'Unused Shmup Tunes' for short.


The Cosine PETSCII logo was pixelled with and data exported from 'ChillED', a soon to be released C64 cross-dev screen editor.  Although I handled all the code, I must confess I was helped over the code finish line by T.M.R with regards that damned MSB thing.

These tunes, as usual, were composed in Goattracker and were originally planned for use in a shoot 'em up game that T.M.R was "planning" as part of a re-write to his existing assembly language tutorials... but, as is often the case with T.M.R, those tutorials ended up being pushed onto the back burner buy other projects and are currently being rather euphemistically referred to as a "work in progress".  Those are T.M.R's words from the Cosine website, not mine! :D

There's nothing amazing going on here code-wise, but as a relative newcomer to 6502, I'm pleasantly surprised how easy it is to recycle sprites, with up to 24 sprites being displayed on occasion in the logo 'pulse' and star field.

The music selector can be download from this blog here.  The download contains the .prg file to run on a C64 or emulator as well as the ACME formatted source and all binaries and work files, including the music files in their original Goattracker .sng format.

It can also be downloaded from the Cosine website here or from the CSDb here.  If you are so inclined, all the files are also available from GitHub here.

T.M.R has written a short piece about the release on his blog here and recorded a video of the music selector in action and uploaded it to YouTube.  The video should appear below, but if not can be viewed here.