Musikaliska uttryck och funktioner i interaktiva v rldar - C64.com

and started working on something else. [-24:35] That was the kind of thing that used to
happen in those days. [-24:39]
One of the other things that used to happen was that we were always looking for ways to
try to find something that the machine could do and that it really wasn’t designed to do. We
used to look in the manual on the C 64 and try to find anything, and look at a diagram of X,
and says “Don’t do this bit, don’t set this bit whatever you do,” and we’d say “I don’t care!
I’m gonna set this bit and see if it does anything!” [25:21-] ”We were always looking for
ways of squeezing more out of this thing by doing things in Assembler and tweaking around.
I remember I had to do this game and I called the guy up and I said: “So what kind of
music do you want for this?”, and the guy was stoned out of his brain! I could tell that he had
been smoking some stuff. He said: “Oh, I just want some Hendrix, man.” [skrattsalvor från
publiken] So, I thought, I can’t really do justice to the famous Jimi Hendrix, but I did this
heavy rock tune with a sampled guitar-thing in it. And that was about as close as I could get to
doing Hendrix. So we did try to do things with 4 bit sampled sound, some things like that to
get some squeeze, some more things, out of it.”[-26:35-]
I remember when we were doing that stuff with sampled sound, the sampled sounds had
been triggered on the non-maskable interrupt and what you would do is, you would get the
fourgram and the raster interrupt doing your main routine and the non-maskable interrupt
doing the sampled sound. What happened was that you would keep tweaking the register on
the speed of the non-maskable interrupt until the whole thing just died! Because at that point
there was no CPU left to do anything. So that’s how you found out what you could actually
get a sample of on that thing. The most that I ever did on the C 64 was two sampled channels,
which was 2 bit audio, or something like that, mixed together. That was the most I ever did on
it, but at that point it was getting really painful to squeeze anything more out of it.”[-27:46]
[27:53-] One of the other things that I did in the 80’s, I did other things besides the C 64. I
used to do a little bit of on the Atari. If anybody here remember the 8-bit Atari, that was a
screaming box CPU-wize, and there was also Atari ST, Amiga. There was this thing called
the Einstein Tatum which was, there was also the MSX machines. And there was this awful
thing called the Sinclair Spectrum [skratt i publiken], if anybody remembers that, and there
was this other thing called the Amstrad (the Amstrad was also 64 k, and then there was the
Amstrad 128, which was just another absolute dog of a machine). [-28:40] But, at that time, I
used to do ports as well. What I did was that I developed a system so that my, she was my
girlfriend at the time, she became my wife, she would be able to understand enough about the
data format that I used on the C 64 to be able to get all this stuff across to these other
machines. So I used to get her to do all that stuff for us, because I was still also playing gigs
with a band as well at that time. I used to have this room set up with these, it was like a ushaped
type of thing, and I had eleven machines surrounding us at that point. I had like two
C 64s, a couple of Ataris, an ST. I was one of the first people to buy an Amiga, I payed £1000
for my Amiga, just because of all the hype and the press and everything about the Amiga.
[-29:48]
It was a little bit painful to program the Amiga in those days as well. We never had a
debugger in the early days. We used to write down this 68 000 code, and if there was a bug,
we just had to write it [the code] down on a piece of paper and just keep on looking at it until
you figured out what the hell the bug was. [-30:14] That was your debugger. [-30:16] I
remember a friend of mine who was just an incredible, this guy used to work for EA, then
worked for 3DO, this guy is just an awesome programmer. I said to him: “What’s the best
debugger?” and he said, “I have this doll (!) that I have, just a little doll, it’s a dummy”, he
says “I put it on a chair.” I says “How’s that help you debug code?” he says: “I explain to this
doll, this dummy, what the problem is, what’s happening with the code, and why it doesn’t
work, and by the time I do it, and I’ve explained it to this dummy, who doesn’t know much,
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