xCellence in bits

I know quite a few C64 enthusiasts, even I count myself as one although not very active in the past few….years, however you need to hear this.

What happened here is that two creative coder made a player routine which features:

• two SID channels
• four digitized playback channels in 8 bit
• full filter control
• no NMI required!
• free rastertime to do something useful

If you’re familiar with the C64 you know what it means. If you are not, the SID is capable of playing 3 channels of generated sounds, it acts as a synth. Digitized sound replay was made with a glitch in the past: whenever you changed volume, the chip made a “tick” so they used it for sound playback in 2-bit and sometimes 4-bit. However as the new version, called the 8580 came out this bug was fixed. No more digi playback for us.

As usual, creativity came and the guys made the playback with frequency modulation, sacrificing a SID channel in the process. This player however plays 4 channels of sound on a single SID channel. This is some very neat coding and softmixing in the background. Mind that you have only 0.98MHz and no sound DMA at all!

You also have to code your player routine in 6510 assembly and and the shorter the better. Being one who actually coded his own player routine, I can say that it’s not easy. Coding a player is one thing, coding a good player is different. There are a lot of things to take into account and even more optimizations you have to do not to run out of precious rastertime.  Of course a player routine means nothing if a capable artist won’t make it sing,in this time it was Fanta who is a very talented composer.

Looks like someone did the impossible again. This platform is full of surprises.