the hard part isn't the notes. it's the per-frame register pokes. galway and hubbard did things like sweeping filter cutoff every frame, gating ring mod between voices, retriggering ADSR mid-note. SID drivers are basically tiny tracker engines running 50hz interrupts on the c64. the .sid format captures the 6510 driver code but stripping that into pattern notation throws away the actual sound. you can transcribe wizball's melody to strudel and it'll be recognizable. it won't sound like galway. the sound IS the register schedule, not the notes on top of it.
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".
> 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.
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.
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 have fond memories of playing this with my dad about thirty five years ago
the hard part isn't the notes. it's the per-frame register pokes. galway and hubbard did things like sweeping filter cutoff every frame, gating ring mod between voices, retriggering ADSR mid-note. SID drivers are basically tiny tracker engines running 50hz interrupts on the c64. the .sid format captures the 6510 driver code but stripping that into pattern notation throws away the actual sound. you can transcribe wizball's melody to strudel and it'll be recognizable. it won't sound like galway. the sound IS the register schedule, not the notes on top of it.
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.
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.
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".
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.
Green Beret and Rambo: First Blood Part 2 tunes are still amazing, Martin is a wizard.
Presumably the music wasn’t developed in form of these source files, given that they exceed the size of C64 RAM.
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.
This is really cool. Need to go grab my Reference Guide to make more sense of it, as it's been a while.
I've been listening this on and off for more than a decade:
https://slayradio.org