Nice. I loved his Short Circuit tune back then and looked at its code with my cartridge's monitor to extract it into a standlone player shell of mine (which might actually have worked out). Great to see the sources for the addresses and their meaning that one had to make guesses about 40 years ago...
Also in the linked player under Short_circuit.sid , btw. Thanks!
> not entirely sure what this one is... another variation of "Define Space" ? check back for the correct definition of this
It's probably 'displacement'. This worked together with ORG ('origin'). ORG specifies where in memory the code will run. DSP then moves the code the specified amount further along in memory, with the understanding that it will be moved back to the ORG address when it needs to run.
> DFC
> not entirely sure what this one is... define characters?
Same as DFM, but generates PETSCII instead of ASCII.
Super cool. I loved Galways's C64 tunes as a kid, especially Wizball & Parallax. I remember trying to write my own player in assembly (yet another unfinished project).
They were absolutely wonderful. And not just those by Galway of course. During Covid by a weird bad luck I got stuck for 2.5 months way from my wife and kid, in another country. But by chance I was, alone, in the house where I grew up. I dug my old C128 (which I only ever used in C64 mode) from the attic, watched Youtube vid, cleaned it, cleaned and lightly oiled (!) the disk drive and tried my old disks...
The game Commando was still loading and I'd let it run for hours on the intro screen (music by Rob Hubbard) while I'd do other things.
> I remember trying to write my own player in assembly (yet another unfinished project).
Never wrote a SID tune nor a mod-player but my neighbors did: they wrote an Amiga mod player for... The Atari ST. It could play the four channels. Of course the quality wasn't the same and you were forced to waste CPU-cycles but it was working.
Fun memories.
Now as TFA: recently I took old DOS .ASM files of mine and basically told Sonnet 4.6: "Make them compile again" and discovered the world of UASM etc. and eventually we made it to compile.
Seeing those C64 assembly files: I haven't tried it yet but I take I could do the same? Just ask whatever LLM to find me a way to compile and tell me how to play these in an emulator?
Anyone knows where to start / what's the TDLR to compile these C64 files?
For example for old DOS .ASM files the TDLR; is "Compile them using the free UASM assembly, run the result in DOSBox".
Props to Martin Galway to make this available to the public. I wish this were more common. I.e. writers could insist on a contractual shorter copyright period when negotiating with publishers.
Then again, I don't know how much authors earn on books after 10, 20, 30 years. It probably varies, the JRR Tolkien estate and K.K Rowling probably see still very significant income streams. It could still be a good strategy for lesser known authors.
Memories! I loved Galway and Hubbard (and tigers and bears oh my etc). They managed to do some really interesting things under the constraints. Still love listening to some of it, today.
I'm not sure about Ocean, but a lot of companies used the Tatung Einstein, itself a 64KiB machine, as a development platform. I would assume that the software used for building this stuff was able to deal with source files larger than the machine can hold. They might've moved onto the likes of Atari STs, IBM-compatibles, and Amigas by the time Wizball was released though.
Plenty of music was developed in the form of source files.
From what I’ve read it was not at all uncommon to have a MS-DOS machine that assembled your code much faster and spat it into the c64 over a parallel link.
Some of the sound drivers would be paired with a machine code monitor, and therefore you could interactively develop by modifying hex bytes, which when you think about it, is basically the prototype for a tracker workflow.
There was definitely a tendency to do "compose on the piano, then arrange" with a lot of the early chiptune workflows though. With Galway's stuff there is more reliance on proceduralism to get those long evolving sequences, something which is actually easier to access when it's built from source files and you can define rhythms, chords, dynamics, modulation as forms of indirection.
Sound trackers actually originated on the C64! Chris Huelsbeck's Soundmonitor is generally regarded as the first tracker. There were plenty of others, such as Electrosound, Future Composer, Ubik's Music, and the Ariston Music Editor. It's not that nobody used software for this kind of thing, but it was pretty common to just use your own sound routine and toggle stuff in.
You can listen to the Wizball tunes here:
https://deepsid.chordian.net/?file=/MUSICIANS/G/Galway_Marti...
(use the little up/down arrows to switch between subtunes)
Nice. I loved his Short Circuit tune back then and looked at its code with my cartridge's monitor to extract it into a standlone player shell of mine (which might actually have worked out). Great to see the sources for the addresses and their meaning that one had to make guesses about 40 years ago...
Also in the linked player under Short_circuit.sid , btw. Thanks!
nice. i have fond memories of playing this with my dad about thirty five years ago
In the file https://github.com/MartinGalway/C64_music/blob/main/ocean_as...
> DSP
> not entirely sure what this one is... another variation of "Define Space" ? check back for the correct definition of this
It's probably 'displacement'. This worked together with ORG ('origin'). ORG specifies where in memory the code will run. DSP then moves the code the specified amount further along in memory, with the understanding that it will be moved back to the ORG address when it needs to run.
> DFC
> not entirely sure what this one is... define characters?
Same as DFM, but generates PETSCII instead of ASCII.
Super cool. I loved Galways's C64 tunes as a kid, especially Wizball & Parallax. I remember trying to write my own player in assembly (yet another unfinished project).
They were absolutely wonderful. And not just those by Galway of course. During Covid by a weird bad luck I got stuck for 2.5 months way from my wife and kid, in another country. But by chance I was, alone, in the house where I grew up. I dug my old C128 (which I only ever used in C64 mode) from the attic, watched Youtube vid, cleaned it, cleaned and lightly oiled (!) the disk drive and tried my old disks...
The game Commando was still loading and I'd let it run for hours on the intro screen (music by Rob Hubbard) while I'd do other things.
> I remember trying to write my own player in assembly (yet another unfinished project).
Never wrote a SID tune nor a mod-player but my neighbors did: they wrote an Amiga mod player for... The Atari ST. It could play the four channels. Of course the quality wasn't the same and you were forced to waste CPU-cycles but it was working.
Fun memories.
Now as TFA: recently I took old DOS .ASM files of mine and basically told Sonnet 4.6: "Make them compile again" and discovered the world of UASM etc. and eventually we made it to compile.
Seeing those C64 assembly files: I haven't tried it yet but I take I could do the same? Just ask whatever LLM to find me a way to compile and tell me how to play these in an emulator?
Anyone knows where to start / what's the TDLR to compile these C64 files?
For example for old DOS .ASM files the TDLR; is "Compile them using the free UASM assembly, run the result in DOSBox".
I've been listening this on and off for more than a decade:
https://slayradio.org
I was hoping someone would point out slayradio. Incredible community of people, and I've been listening and chatting with those guys for decades.
Q: have people attempted to translate this into Tidal Cycles, or Strudel JS? (Pattern playing of music by notation)
Edit: AI says doing the translation would be hard, though doable. https://claude.ai/share/65c16d60-5d27-496b-96a7-40959e95ac62
Edit 2: here is an AI translation of some of the notes, what Claude claims as the main melody:
https://strudel.cc/#Ci8vIFdpemJhbGwgIklucHV0IE5hbWUiIC0gbWFp... .. uh ...
Edit 3: the original theme is amazing and worth listening to https://youtu.be/sFYzjU-C3mA
I had to give it a try.
Claude, the ole cheater, recognized what the file was, downloaded the psid from the web, found a wasm sid player and built a website around it:
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/df6cdcae-08dc-452b-ba19-f...
https://claude.ai/share/4dd36c16-bc62-445a-b423-ad4637f06432
GPT-5.5 built a lot of python scripts to extract the music data. Strudel implementation failed, but I then asked it to build a website:
https://ubiquitous-vacherin-8e7993.netlify.app/
This is a translation of the music into javascript based on the assembler source.
Really impressive on both accounts. Some iterations were requied for both.
That sounds nothing like any of the Wizball or Game Over tracks, I'm afraid.
Thanks for that. The Laboratory Background riff sounds a lot like versalife[0]
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF09vGckSAc&list=PLKkxnBwFOJ...
Hah! I never noticed that, but you're right!
For those interested in how the Wizball soundtrack should sound, the best place to go is DeepSID: https://deepsid.chordian.net/?file=/MUSICIANS/G/Galway_Marti...
Green Beret and Rambo: First Blood Part 2 tunes are still amazing, Martin is a wizard.
Props to Martin Galway to make this available to the public. I wish this were more common. I.e. writers could insist on a contractual shorter copyright period when negotiating with publishers.
Then again, I don't know how much authors earn on books after 10, 20, 30 years. It probably varies, the JRR Tolkien estate and K.K Rowling probably see still very significant income streams. It could still be a good strategy for lesser known authors.
JRR Tolkien still makes money from copyright but sadly can't write books anymore. The whole absurdity of copyright law.
Memories! I loved Galway and Hubbard (and tigers and bears oh my etc). They managed to do some really interesting things under the constraints. Still love listening to some of it, today.
hubbard was the only big name i grew up with but also played the shit out of arkanoid growing up.
Presumably the music wasn’t developed in form of these source files, given that they exceed the size of C64 RAM.
I'm not sure about Ocean, but a lot of companies used the Tatung Einstein, itself a 64KiB machine, as a development platform. I would assume that the software used for building this stuff was able to deal with source files larger than the machine can hold. They might've moved onto the likes of Atari STs, IBM-compatibles, and Amigas by the time Wizball was released though.
Plenty of music was developed in the form of source files.
There's always another 80s computer I'd never heard of...
The Tatung Einstein was released in 1984 in the UK, was kind of MSX-like architecturally, and used the same 3" (not 3.5") floppies as the Amstrad CPC.
I'm curious what US-based C64 devs would have used. Probably not this machine?
From what I’ve read it was not at all uncommon to have a MS-DOS machine that assembled your code much faster and spat it into the c64 over a parallel link.
> Plenty of music was developed in the form of source files.
That's fascinating. I came in during the Amiga era, and everything was SoundTracker etc. files. I had no idea that music was hand-coded like this.
Some of the sound drivers would be paired with a machine code monitor, and therefore you could interactively develop by modifying hex bytes, which when you think about it, is basically the prototype for a tracker workflow.
There was definitely a tendency to do "compose on the piano, then arrange" with a lot of the early chiptune workflows though. With Galway's stuff there is more reliance on proceduralism to get those long evolving sequences, something which is actually easier to access when it's built from source files and you can define rhythms, chords, dynamics, modulation as forms of indirection.
Sound trackers actually originated on the C64! Chris Huelsbeck's Soundmonitor is generally regarded as the first tracker. There were plenty of others, such as Electrosound, Future Composer, Ubik's Music, and the Ariston Music Editor. It's not that nobody used software for this kind of thing, but it was pretty common to just use your own sound routine and toggle stuff in.
It wasn’t, but somenpopulqr assemblers that ran on the C64 used tokenized text and could fit quite a bit in ram.
Not old enough to have experienced that era of computing but I do know that Cosmic Bakery slaps.
This is really cool. Need to go grab my Reference Guide to make more sense of it, as it's been a while.
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Taking a brief look at wizball.asm, it actually used 200 Hz interrupts on both PAL and NTSC. The timings are shown from line 39.
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