SNDH 4.1

This is my first SNDH blog entry where I add details and snippets about the release.

V4.1 breaks another mile stone, with the 7000 sub-tune target surpassed! Quite a feat and one  which I never imagined would come.

Ok lets start with some information about the new tunes in the update :-

• M.U.D.S. (Mean Ugly Dirty Sports). This game by Rainbow Arts was originally released on the Amiga and PC. An ST conversion was planned, work had begun but for unknown reasons it was shelved mid development. Luckily Jochen Hippel had already converted Chris Huelsbeck's AmigaTFMX tunes. In 2010 he sent me a ZIP file with lots of old tunes. Lo and behold an executable file containing MUDS was included. Conversion was a little tricky due to the driver exclusively using address registers and the user stack pointer. Expect the executable on Pouet in the next couple of days. Whilst converting I noticed the music driver was also used in Turrican hence its inclusion in the archive as well! Note: the tunes use a substantial amount of CPU time, so much so, only speedy machines Mega STe & Falcon are fast enough to play the songs within SNDPlayer. On a side note, I expected the same driver to work with Z-Out, Quik & Silva  and Turrican 2, but Jochen slightly modified his player code. Expect these tunes in the next update!
• Music by Gary Wheaton. Many moons ago (2002!) GGN emailed me listing tunes not included in the SNDH archive. Some of these were tunes by the prolific Budgie UK composer Gary Wheaton, finally they have a public airing, was it worth it?!
• Silly Venture 2012 certainly delivered in the release stakes. As you would expect, all the tunes are now in the archive including the exotic Checktrakk tunes.
• New Exotic Sample Player! Over the years there has been two distinct paths for ST music collectors, SNDH for chip lovers and Fading Twilight for MOD followers (no scooters in sight!). I must admit I've never really had an affection for MOD's apart from the classic RSi , Kefrens or PHA Amiga tunes. However there are tunes, which so far have not been in either collection. We are talking about exotic digi tunes. Well this omission is no more. Evil has created an SNDH sample player, the first fruits of his labour include :- Starglider,  Mewilo and Into the Eagles Nest. Expect more in the next update, I'll look at Bomb The Bass's remix of the John Carpenter classic first!! Xenon 2.
• B.I.G. Demo Digital Department. How the hell have these tunes remained un-ripped for so long? Rectified in.... ahem... 2013. Player wasn't too flashy and all the tunes use the same sample file, I've decided to split them into separate SNDH files although I could have easily have had one 40kb file with sub-tunes. The driver is very similar to the B.I.G. Demo chip tunes with the C64 note format conversion.
• More Quartet. The SNDH 2 Quartet utility was used once again to SNDHify more tunes. Game tunes to enjoy include Advantage Tennis and Cadaver. We also have lots of conversions by Scott R Lemmon, who was a US sysop. Sadly I learnt he passed away some years ago.
• Mr Coke was nice enough to give me the source to his tiny music driver when I met him at Outline 2012. GGN has un-TASM'd the tunes which are now in SNDH format.
• Pavel Puchala and Lotek sent me many XBIOS 32 tunes. These were perhaps the earliest Atari tunes as they use the in-built TOS routines. The quality is not the greatest but they deserve their place in the archive.
• The final tune worth mentioning is Arkanoid digi-drum music by Jochen Hippel. Tao of Cream brought the tune to my attention. It was used in a cracktro by TEX for the aforementioned game. Once again Jochen converted the C64 note data, this time from Martin Galway to the ST. What makes this tune really special is that, in my opinion, it's the first to feature digi-drums. It precedes both Bad Cat and the Super Neo Show which as of now were thought to be the first examples of such tunes. It was not an easy patch as the drums are not played with the MFP or HBL!

Ok that's enough of my thoughts, hope these behind the scene witterings are interesting!

Grazey