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

ox that I couldn’t get to do anything. So I persevered with this thing and eventually I learned
Basic and learned about the graphic side of what was going on with this box. [-05:05] Then I
was reading about Assembly language, how much better, and how much faster that was, so I
thought: “Well, I’m gonna have to dabble with the assembly language.” [-05:20] The first
thing I did in the assembly language on the C 64 was [to] move a sprite across the screen, just
like that [demonstrerar med rörelse med handen]. If you ever did that in Basic on the C 64 it
would move like that [gör långsam handrörselse från höger till vänster]. You do it in assembly
language, it would, [demonstrera med snabb handrörelse] you couldn’t even see it move
across the screen. [-05:42] The only problem was, in that time, I didn’t have an Assembler, so
I had to basically poke numbers in memory and then do a system call and just see what would
happened. Most of the time it would just crasch. [-05:56] But, anyway, that got my interest
going and I got heavily into learning hexadecimals 6502. The next thing that I had to try to
learn was this business of interrupts, that was just a completely weird concept. None of the
books, none of the people I talked to, could really explain how it all worked. But like
everything else, eventually something clicks and it falls into place and you understand what
interrupts are. [-06:38] Then I started coding the music player and some of the graphic type
effects. I wrote graphic editors and things like that as well, because it all helped to learn the
assembly language. [-06:54] So, learning hex, and hexadecimal 6502 interrupts was all really
the thing that stimulated my imagination. [07:13-] Like everybody here I was an utter fanatic
about this stuff! [07:19-] I would basically keep working until 5 o’clock in the morning and
then, of course we had tape machines in those days, so I’d work till 5 o’clock in the morning
and then I’d think “O God, I have to save this stuff, I got at least another hour and a half”,
because I had to make two saves on cassette, which would take like fourtyfive minutes of
source code [each]. You got to do two saves because you just couldn’t risk just saving once.
Then I would get up in the next morning and the first thing that you would do, before you did
anything, was to start the load from tape, because it would take another fourtyfive minutes to
load it up, assuming that there wasn’t an error. So you would start the load and then have
breakfast. [-08:07]
What happened after that was that I dabbled with doing some educational softwork,
because [säger han mycket ironiskt] I thought that was a really good idea. So I did a suite of
three programs and took them to the schools. They thought they were really good, but, well
they said that “Well, we don’t have any money to spend on any of this stuff, we’ll just have to
buy books.” [-08:35] So, I thought, what else am I gonna do. [08:43-] So, I started looking at
the games, and in the earliest games that where around in 1982 and -83, most of the music
was done by the programmer (the programmer did everything in those days) and some of the
music was just absolutely diabolical. I mean, it was just…it was embarrassing! It was like a
drunken monkey on the piano trying to play the Blue Danube, or something. And, I thought,
there has to be an opening for someone who can at least get the notes right, and in the correct
order for God’s sake! [-09:25] What I did after that was that I started working with a games
company to produce a game [spelet som åsyftas är troligtvis Razzmatazz, se “The Musicians’
Ball”, Appendix II]. There was this breakfast cereal called Wheatabix, I don’t know if
anybody here have had a wheatabix. So, they had this little character that looked like a
wheatabix cereal, with legs. So we were gonna do this game based upon this. I wrote graphics
editors, I wrote a run-lenght compression routine for graphics to do this stuff. [But] they could
never produce the game because the fact they hadn’t been in contact with Wheatabix about
this, so, you know, it’s like ”Hello!” [skratt] [-10:26] So, the company went under just as I
basically had finished the game. It took med eight months to do this thing, and the few people
who ever saw this thing thought that, you know…they thought that the graphics where ok, and
I did all the graphics myself. They thought the game really sucked! But they thought that the
sound was, just like, fantastic! They thought that the music was great! So I thought that ok,
98