Eagles Dare

Cosine has released "Eagles Dare" which features a new SID tune by me!  T.M.R coded this intro as an entry for the 'Intro Creation Competition' over at CSDb.

According to T.M.R on the Cosine website:

"The eagle picture was found on the internet in 2018 when the idea of creating a cover of the Eagle Soft intro was first being considered, but the final modifications to add a floppy disk were added when some already existing scrolling message code was merged into the project... the scrolling message uses Extended Background Colour Mode which is usually limited to the first 64 characters of a font, but in this particular case the text writer can select any character from the 512 available in the C64's character ROM."

T.M.R also has a personal blog entry sharing further thoughts about the intro.  Read that here.

The title of the music is 'Smaciwch fy Ffolennau' which I'll leave you to go and Google translate from Welsh into your chosen language... :D

And now the downloads:  grab the intro from CSDb here or from the Cosine website here.  If you fancy grabbing the intro as well as the music in SID format, along with the original Goattracker music work file for you to poke and prod, download from this blog here.

T.M.R has recorded a video of the intro in action.  It should appear below, but if not can be viewed on YouTube here.

Funky Stars

There is an event on CSDb that has become almost annual now called the 'Intro Creation Competition'.  In this compo, entries must be created that could be an intro to something (such as a game crack) and must conform to a certain set of rules which I won't explain here, but if you're interested can be read here.

This competition is one of T.M.R's favourites and, since I've taken to coding on the C64 this past year, he suggested I take part.  I agreed but, not wanting to blacken the Cosine or Arkanix Labs names (C64 groups I'm a member of) in case I came last, I requested that it be released using T.M.R's other 'label', Commodore Crap Debunk (C64CD);  as a result, T.M.R has now made me a C64CD member!

Thus, after a few weeks of coding, pixelling and composing (yes, I did the lot!), C64CD has today released 'Funky Stars'.

This intro is so called because the music within it is a SID cover of an Impulse Tracker tune called 'Funky Stars' (but also know as 'Hybrid Song') by Quazar of Sanxion.

This little project has been quite interesting in the fact that one of the compo rules says that the intro must be 16K or under in the same block of memory.  This is not something I'm used to, so was an interesting challenge, particularly since my Goattracker SID ended up being over 3.5K in size.  Whoops!  To squeeze everything in to the same block, I ended up doing little tricks such as assembling the screen data straight to $0400, amongst other things.  Thanks to T.M.R for his guidance on this!

There was also some new learning here for me.  I've always been fascinated by the use of 'raster bars' on the C64 and although I knew it was something to do with writing colours values to each scanline, I've never previously attempted it until now!

Anyway, enough of the waffle!  If you would like to see the intro in action on an emulator or real hardware, it can be downloaded from CSDb here or direct from this blog here.  The download also contains the ACME source code and all work files, including the SID tune in it's Goattracker .sng format.

T.M.R has also written short pieces on his own blog here and on the main C64CD blog here, as well as recording a video of the intro in action.  The video should appear below, but if not can be found on YouTube here.