Well we've finally broken the 500 composer barrier. The honour goes to 607 who sent us a couple of Quartet tunes.
Above: 500, yay!
We have already added 10 tunes for the next update. New stuff includes an unknown Lotus/Hotline Synth dream tune. Plus "Lotus 3 - The Ultimate Challenge" now has the full compliment of subtunes 22 as opposed to 6. Shoddy ripping by me!
It's August! This appears to be the SNDH release month so without further ado 4.6 makes it online.
As I mentioned previously it's a mixed bunch of tunes ranging from cutting edge X-Bios 32 tunes, to simple Maxymiser and Sid Sound Designer beeps.... or is that the other way round?!
In the old days I wasn't really interested in ripping and SNDHing exotic digi formats. I'm a chip connoisseur at heart, stemming from my C64 beginnings. However things changed when I wanted to listen to the superb Great Giana Sisters digi title track in Winjam and alike. The rip gave birth to SNDH-Digi. The resulting Giana conversion was pretty straight forward, similar to converting digi-drum tunes - read: MFP malarkey. Nowadays another reason for adding digi tracks is simply because most chip tunes are now included in the SNDH database. New modern tunes are practically all composed in either Maxymiser, Sid Sound Designer or Music-Mon - soon to included the DML tracker?!
Anyway I digress. One such game with exotic digi was the ancient Turbo Cup by Loriciel. At the time people thought it was a sequence of samples but it was in fact Loriciel's own in-house tracker. It amazes me that the ST did not follow the Amiga path, admittedly both machines had a myriad of exotic chip tunes in the early days but the Amiga soon progressed through SoundMon, Future Composer and later the behemoth that is Sound/Pro-Tracker to make exotic tunes the exception not the norm. The ST on the otherhand continued with individual musician assembly routines right to the twilight of the ST. At least this keeps me in a job. Back to Turbo Cup, the rather funky composition was by Michel Winogradoff. Thankfully he kept the same music code for future Loriciel releases: Bumpy and the weird but cool: Disc.
Above: L-R Turbo Cup, Disc & Bumpy
I hate the Unknown Composers folder. Why oh why didn't Sid Sound Designer have a nice composer field, why didn't game manuals have full credits? We will never know. At least as we move forward snippets of information appear which reduce those unknowns. This time tunes gaining rightful ownership include a batch of tunes from Jovis of Zuul. Delirious Demo 2 reset (a common tune in cracktros) which now sits with Stan Mercury of OVR, originally this was in Unknown, then it moved to Doclands. However Doclands has confirmed he simply improved Stan's song to make it "listenable!". Other tunes finally credited include Karate Kid II (by the legendary Steve Bak).
"Bittner, bit, bit, bit ,bit Bittner" carrying on the digi exotic theme. The classic Bittner rap makes its rather belated entry into the database. Sampled sick.... so love that.
Above: Bittner rap!
ST News editor Richard Karsmakers decided to convert some of his old demos to the CODEF framework <http://st-news.com/issues/bonus-materials/>` , the demos mostly feature tunes written in Activision's Music Studio. His work identified that some Music Studio SNDH files did not sound 100%. On closer inspection it was because I had re-written the play routine to work with Timer C. However, I've have now reverted to the original play method using Timer A at a rather speedy 980hz! As well as the MS files, Richard sent me tonnes of X-Bios 32 tunes, these are now in the archive as well. An added bonus is that I've written two little utilities to automatically convert X32 and Music Studio files to SNDH. See the tools section on the SNDH page.
New composers this release :- Fred Eric Gerard (Titus programmer responsible for Crazy Cars III and Super Cauldron), yqn, Lonestar, black (active coder and composer!), Mr Man, Ged and Michael Open.
We have a smattering of new tunes too. Tomchi, DMA-SC, gwEm, !cube, xfalcon, 505, 7AN, Wiecz0r, Lotek & EIA continue to fly the flag. All credit to you 21st century YM troopers.
Finally, the SNDH database now contains 499 different composers.... so... who is gonna be number 500!?
Well a little blog post to fill in the gaps since the last SNDH release in August 2015! Crikey, doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun? More like: time flies when you’re heading into the realms of middle age and you have no time for the ST.
As far as the collection goes, currently (as of 12th May 2016) we have 158 new/updated SNDH’s comprising 225 tunes. Quite a mixed bunch of tunes ranging from the MusicMon delights of BITS demos to the winning entry Flash of the ROM by fellow PHF member gwEm at last year’s epic STNICCC. Anyway that’s just a taster of what the next release will feature. Now a few thoughts about PHF / SNDH related goings on :-
As I mentioned in December 2015 all three current PHF members descended on the Netherlands for the third STNICCC party. Cal & Grazey attended the last party in 2000 but this was gwEm’s first experience of a vintage and current scene cocktail, kind of like Babycham mixed with Red Bull I guess. Well the Northern contingent of the crew decided to insanely bike from the Kingston Upon Hull (UK City of Culture 2017 – more of that later) to Gouda. gwEm quite rightly took the more speedy and civilised flying route into Schiphol.
Above: L-R Grazey on his way, Cal made it!, PHF (Grazey, Cal, gwEm)
From an Atari music perspective the party far exceeded all my dreams and expectations. Firstly there was the small matter of two chip musician legends within my floppy disk throwing arc. Then there was the plethora of new ST chip tunes submitted to the compo! Within a few minutes Richard Karsmakers introduced me and Cal to Rob Hubbard, yes, “Rob fucking Hubbard”. Rob was my true hero back in the day. Strangely at that time (1985-6ish), around Zzap! 64 and their Musician’s Ball articles I did not realise Rob came from our home city. I’d never met Rob before even though I only live less than 10 miles from the maestro. In fact it was Hubbard and Jeroen Tel/MON tunes who were the catalyst for my music ripping ‘career’ – my first rips were on the C64 before moving to the ST.
Above: L-R Paul Loraine, Rob Hubbard, Grazey
Within seconds both myself and Cal were immersed in “’ull speak” dialog, it was if we’d known him for years. Also in our conversation was Paul Loraine who I’d met at a 40th birthday party in Newcastle, I’d know Paul’s brother for years from many Glastonbury festivals, but never knew his brother had been a commercial chip musician – releasing game tunes including Huckleberry Hound, Popeye 2 and Arcade Trivia Quiz.. Dutchies and Germans looked on as our conversion became more indecipherable, this continued to lunch time when we shared rather delicious Dutch meatballs.
Above: L-R. Rob Hubbard, Grazey(PHF), Tinker(Teenage), gwEm (PHF), BBM(Demografica)
During this time I quizzed Rob on the origins of his ST music routine. Rob only did a handful of ST tunes, the most notable been Goldrunner which was a cover of his C64 Mastertronic Human Race IV tune (one narnty narn!). Rob explained that it was Steve Bak (coder of the ultra smooth Goldrunner) who actually converted a Z80 music driver to 68000. He then gave this to David Whittaker who used it before writing his own ubiquitous music routine. He also confirmed that he did write the ST music to Thundercats. Whittaker was often wrongly credited with writing the tune due to the use of Rob’s driver and no credits within the game. It was during this time Rob eventually moved to California to work for Electronic Arts – there his ST tunes dried up with the exception of the digital track for Populous (still not SNDH’d – shock!).
One other snippet, as I mentioned myself and Cal biked to Gouda from Hull, we did this via the P&O ferry from Hull to Rotterdam. This is a big overnight ferry which can carry in excess of 1500 passengers, 200 cars, 200 lorries, it’s like a floating hotel. Anyway on board there’s 2 restaurants, 1 dance stage, 2 cinemas, 4 bars. The top deck bar is called the “Sky Lounge” this is frequented normally by the older generations, the Sky Lounge consists of a cocktail bar and the music is provided by the in-house Richard Cladermanesque pianist.
Above: L-R. Pride of Hull ferry, Sky Lounge pianist
Back to the plot, I asked what Rob did when he returned to the UK from EA, you know what?! He became the resident pianist on our ferry!! Sooooo wish I’d known at the time, mmh piano version of Phantoms of the Asteroid or Commando anyone?!
Anyway our chat moved to things closer to home – notably Hull City of Culture 2017
Hull was named as the UK’s City of Culture in 2013, known for being the home of poet Philip Larkin, Sir Tom Courtney, Mick Ronson, Amy Johnson, William Wilberforce, John Venn & of course Rob Hubbard. I asked if Rob had any plans to be involved – I was thinking something along the lines of a SuperByte, but Rob said he was hopefully planning an orchestral extravaganza performing some of his greatest works to a local audience. Lets hope so!
There the Hullites went their separate ways, Rob drifted on a historical tour of Gouda, Grazey & Cal shifted upstairs for a bit of coding and movem.l d0-d7,$ffff8840.w – shadow!
Anyway that ends the first part of my STNICCC SNDH blog, part 2 will feature Maaaaad Maaaaxx
Here we are 4.5 finally! Taken quite a while, but there's a lot going on behind the scenes. Our intention was to release this update with the BIG changes ahead, however we decided to get this beast in the wild so we can concentrate on the future of SNDH.
Ok a few notes about this release which entered my head:
Stefan Lindberg hinted that my SNDH for Zone Warrior did not sound the same as in the game (I remember years ago that my Utopia rip never sounded 100% but never really investigated why. First the game contained an extra 10 tunes, which are now added. But more importantly my SNDH did not play the tunes as they sounded within the game. This was because I assumed the music driver was only called once every 50th of a second (VBL). On closer inspection I noticed there was also some music code within the game's Timer B raster code and two routines were called for the play routine and not one. Fear not, the SNDH now sounds the same as the game. A knock on effect from this is that some other Barry Leitch musics also feature this driver - hence updates of Utopia, Viking Child, Raiden, Impossamole, Pegasus and Super Cars 2 and Harlequin which all sound much better :) Just as I was about to release 4.5 I was pointed in the direction of a Youtube interview with Barry in the interview Bazza divulged that he also composed the music to the ground breaking ST busting Postman Pat .... so that makes it way into the archive too!
I've had a semi finished rip of Richard Joseph's Moonshine Racer on my hard drive for years. The reason for this is the 'faffy' way the game plays the intro music. Rather than having one tune it calls multiple sub tunes which are embedded into the game's code. Anyway I finally added my own timer routine into the game which measured exactly when each sub tune was called.... so now you can hear the tune as it sounds in the game :) As usual I checked Atarimania for any un-ripped Joseph tunes, therefore I've also done Dragon's Breath and Demoniak.
Seems sub tune 9 of X-Out was buggy, all fixed now.
Stefan once again came up with some obscure unknown information relating to the Gremlin game Federation of Free Traders. We are all aware of the famous title music for this came which was the opening piece for my UMD 8730 intro. However I didn't know the game featured another 18 sub-tunes which could be loaded from a separate music disk. Needless to say they are now included!
FOFT Music Disk
I've recently backed Dave Lowe's successful Kickstarter project which will be updating his old tunes onto CD (including a full orchestral version of Frontier - Elite 2!). Anyway I mentioned on his site about updating Venus The Flytrap. Surprisingly he responded to say that it wasn't one of his tunes! After further investigating I found the 68000 music driver code is identical to my new SNDH of BSS Jane Seymour. I'm therefore pretty confident that both tunes are by Jason Sheppard. But it doesn't stop there! I'd never SNDH'd many of Dave's digi tracks - so you now have Carrier Command, Starglider 2 and the funky After Burner which features his sample sequencer. Oh and more of his sound chip stuff too: Raffles, Betrayal and The Games: Summer Edition.
A bit of self promotion next. Over the summer I released a little MSA imager called Trans D-Bug Express the program gives the best success rate for imaging old disks (far higher than MSA 1.4, MSA 2.3 or Fcopy DIM format). This was a team effort with additional code by GGN, lush GFX by Ukko and Kraftwerk music by gwEm. In the archive you will find music from TDE both in its release form and gwEm original which features additional samples!
Warp Preview - as usual we like to include exclusives. This time an ancient Mad Max preview version of Warp using his old music driver. This also includes a sub tune unused in the final release version!
It's not just old stuff, we've got many party releases and tunes by new composers like Shinobi (particularly dig your Dropzone tune!)
Finally I've ripped / SNDH'd some tunes which were in my "can't be arsed / too difficult" folder.... firstly there's Sapiens most of you will recognised both sub tunes as Chrispy Noodle of the BBC did chip covers of both of these. Quite an advanced digi synth for the time Mr Soulet.
The other major format I've done for this release is Sierra's AGI & SCI interpreter, so now you can hear all the unmistakable Al Lowe tunes from Leisure Suit Larry, King's Quest, Space Quest and cutting edge games like Donald Ducks Playtime! thanks to Don Adan for some of the data files from the Amiga versions.
Enjoy - Grazey / Showaddywaddy, Evil DHS
Some guy on Atari-Age asked me if I could write a little progette to convert Music Studio SNDH files back to their native format so he could play via midi.
No problem, the massive 1kb PRG is here
Oh and Dave Lowe's kickstarter has reminded me I had not ripped Carrier Command or Starglider 2, remedied and in SNDH 4.5
Grz
Don't worry, the lack of post on here doesn't mean I've been dormant. There's been plenty of activity SNDH wise. Looking ahead we should have an SNDH update back ready for the Outline party in the Netherlands in May. Plenty of good stuff will be included including many of the Sierra games :)
I'm also doing other things with my D-Bug hat on which again may see the light of day at Outline.
Here we are with SNDH release v4.4 (available at http://sndh.atari.org )
Let us start with the rather Dutch slant this time. Well you can blame Lowlife/Hotline for that! :)
He posted on Facebook that he had found some old disks containing unreleased stuff! This included music files and the source code to TLB's Killing Spree (which we released at the Outline demo party).
On inspecting the disks I found many new tracks from Scavenger, ISO, Dr Beat, ENS and EVE. This provides the back bone of v4.4.
The Dutch theme continues with a comprehensive Lotus release. His Synth Dream music driver was rather nastily coded, well in the day it was quite innovative but from the sense of making it Falcon and OS compatible it's nasty! So finally we have all his tunes in SNDH format after co work from myself and gwEm.
Next we have 20 tunes from French composer Charles Callet, once I worked out his music format ripping other games became easy. As usual Atari-Mania assisted in locating obscure titles written by Charles. Although I've found many other Callet tunes which are yet to be credited in their database.
Other worthy mentions include Quartet tunes by Flix / Delta Force and some nice C64/ST conversions by Simon O.
I also located a very early Mad Max tune of Axel F used in a TEX cractro plus an un-released tune for Rings of Medusa!
As usual a some duplicate tunes have been deleted including Thundercats which is written by Sir Rob Hubbard and not David Whittaker.
Final mention and grateful thanks to GGN who with my help wrote a massive batch STOS song extractor!! To some this deserves a severe kicking, to other YM aficionados it deserves a pat on the back and a cup of Yorkshire tea! :) Expect more of these STOS treats in the next release!