DYCP 2018

Along with 'Blok Copy' for Atari 8bit, Cosine has released an Atari 8bit demo called 'DYCP 2018', a contribution to the 'New Years Disk' collection arranged on the AtariAge forum.  Don't be fooled by the C64 boot screen in the image below - it's actually an Atari posing as a C64!

The music is a 'triple speed' tune and was written by me using the excellent RASTER Music Tracker; it is one of my first POKEY's, along with the music from the Atari 8bit version of Blok Copy.

The music is actually a cover of a cover of an original track by Jason Page (the loading music from the amazing Amiga game 'Uridium 2' by Andrew Braybrook).  I covered this tune on the C64 SID back in 2015 for the 'SID Doing Paula' music collection and the POKEY version is a cover of this SID version.

The demo containing the music can be downloaded from the Cosine website here...

If you would like the raw RASTER Music Tracker file to load and mess around with, it can be downloaded here...

Arkracknix

Arkanix Labs has just released my entry to the 'Crack Intro Music Competition 2017'.  The C64 SID is called 'Arkracknix', a portmanteau of 'Arkanix' and 'crack'.

The competition was organised by Didi and Jammer and had the following rules:

- max. playtime 1:00 min. (PAL playing speed), then repeat or fade.
- max. size: $1000 bytes (preferably located in memory at $1000-$2000)
- single speed only
- no SID model preference (should sound good on all SID models)
- must be handed in as executable format .sid or .prg (might be embedded in .t64 or .d64)
- no graphics or even intro-like presentation is allowed to be included.
- Productions using the music might be released after the voting deadline. The voting should be focused on the music itself.
- the participating musics may not have been released or used in a public production before.
- multiple entries per musician allowed.

My entry was written in Goattracker and as per the rules, plays on both 6581 and 8580 versions of the SID chip.  The SID loops at around the 53s mark.

Information about the competition, including all the entries and any results can be found on CSDb here...

There  was quite an extensive forum thread about the competition here...

You can download my entry from CSDb here...

However!  If you download from this blog, you will get a zip file containing: the tune in SID format, the tune in PRG format that can be dropped into an emulator or transferred to a real C64 and is ready to run, the tune on a D64 image along with SIDPLAY64 ready to run and the tune in the Goattracker native SNG format so you can load it into the editor to poke around with.  As a bonus, there is also a folder called 'unused' which contains another tune that I did not enter because it was too long and I didn't have time to finish.  This tune is in both SID format and SNG format, so you can mess with that too.  Grab all that here...

UPDATE:

After voting, my entry came 52nd out of 85 entries.  That may not sound great, but it scored quite highly on CSDb (8.4 / 10), higher than some tunes that were higher placed.  The scoring system used the CSDb voting system and I didn't understand it... ;)