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Rob Hubbard - POKEY Music


The_Laird

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Hello everyone,

 

I am really pleased to be back here after an extended hiatus and thought I would share my latest video with you, a round up of POKEY music by the legendary Rob Hubbard. In this video there are his original tracks as well as POKEY re-makes of some of his C64 tunes and some tunes that make use of the brilliant SID Player like the recently released Chimera+.

 

I hope you all enjoy them :)

 

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Welcome back, I've enjoyed the chiptunes videos you've posted on YouTube. Watched (listened to!) the Top 20 Atari Lynx Tunes earlier today, and that brought back some fond memories. And I love Atari 8-bit POKEY music, as my first computer was an 800XL, and it just spiraled out of control from there. There's so much POKEY music, I'm always hearing something I've never listened to before.

 

I look forward to seeing your contributions to the forum, you obviously have a great deal of enthusiasm for this hobby!

 

..Al

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Is there a utility, possibly for Windows or Mac OSX that would let us convert SID tunes to POKEY? They're always updating the High Voltage SID Collection. I'd totally leave a machine going all weekend to get them all converted over.

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Good luck on that, Delta uses border sprites galore iirc, I'd imagine with the colours and sprite mix it would be a flickering mess, TMR would be the right man to ask re his thoughts on a possible conversion process.

 

I'd imagine its a multiplexing nightmare..

Edited by Mclaneinc
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No its more simple than you think. Enemy sprites (7 maximum) and shots are soft sprites and our ship with the coloured ball shots are A8 PMGs.

Enemys never go into grounds and its indeed very similar to what we did on X:8.

On X:8 you have maximum 16enemys on screen but they doesn't do a real masking between them and here because there is reduce them to only 7 and we'll have enough cpu/cycles.

PeteD was thinking in this one some years ago but then he give up coding.

I did some conversions of the grounds and all the letters+symbols into A8 chars+charsets sometime ago and it's just one more I have here waiting for one day and someone to take the code :)...

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Delta simply 'worked' on C64, lights out, volume turned up LOUD...i'm in the zone.

If Zzap64 ever under-rated a C64 game..it was this.
I'd of hated to of seen a cut down version on A8, personally.
Maybe 7800 'better suited' with Pokey on Cart? but i dunno...certain games just really seemed to play to the strengths of the C64.
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I'll happily take any coders word, as after seeing Space Harrier on A8, i'm gobsmacked at what folks have gotten out of the hardware, if anyone can deliver an A8 version of Delta without going over the Ram etc of a stock C64, i'd be delighted to see it.

 

As a gamer, all i've to go on, as it were, are the A8 versions of things like Dropzone, Ninja, Last V8, Zybex, Ninja Commando, IK, Last V8, Red Max, Panther, Draconus etc to see how the 2 versions compare.

 

Audio wise espically when you have say Hubbard and Whitt.doing music for both A8 and C64 versions.I was refering to the in-game music on Delta by the way, not the loader.

 

I was'nt a ZX Spectrum owner, but someone had a crack at converting Delta to it, did'nt they? Delta Charge?.How did that turn out?.

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Good luck on that, Delta uses border sprites galore iirc, I'd imagine with the colours and sprite mix it would be a flickering mess, TMR would be the right man to ask re his thoughts on a possible conversion process.

i'm almost with José really, for me the best bet would be to convert the landscapes to characters and everything in the main play area (just shy of 200 scanlines high when landscapes are off, around 110 when on give or take) to software sprites apart from the starfield and player craft. Then you "just" need an efficient software sprite renderer that'll do seven enemies and i think a couple of dozen bullets at 50FPS. The nasties don't go near the landscapes because they can't, but player and enemy bullets pass through those spaces so those either need to be allowed for or redesigned out.

 

i suspect a 128K machine'd be needed since the C64 is fairly close to the brim for graphics and doesn't have to juggle pre-shifts or secondary display buffers and it does mean the colour count is going down overall since the enemies will have to share colours, but i reckon it's viable in some form. i'd worry about the music though...

 

I was'nt a ZX Spectrum owner, but someone had a crack at converting Delta to it, did'nt they? Delta Charge?.How did that turn out?.

It runs at about two thirds the size (every 24 by 21 pixel hardware sprite gets scaled down to 16 by 16), the framerate has dropped and if memory serves they didn't go for AY support so no soundtrack. Not a bad shooter mind, but i'd go for some of the bigger names in preference personally. =-)

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TMR on A8 because our ship and the ball shots are PMGs then they are in distinct colour to any of the grounds and enemys and if you have, lets say PF0 always white to use on the shots it will look better than some of restrictions you'll see on C64 (only a less colourfull starfield and of course that the stars can't be in hi-resolution).

The grounds on C64 are two sprites tall so they have to be turned into chars. I think I reduced them to 2x2 chars tall.

If I remember it right the screen layout I got was (in an example with top and bottom grounds):

-> Top status: 3charlines

-> Top ground: 4charlines

-> Middle: 12, 13 or 14charlines

-> Bottom ground: 4charlines

-> Bottom icons: 3charlines

This gets us to a 26,27 or 28charlines total and the middle part where most of things happen in a very similar size as on the C64.

Edited by José Pereira
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i'm almost with José really, for me the best bet would be to convert the landscapes to characters and everything in the main play area (just shy of 200 scanlines high when landscapes are off, around 110 when on give or take) to software sprites apart from the starfield and player craft. Then you "just" need an efficient software sprite renderer that'll do seven enemies and i think a couple of dozen bullets at 50FPS. The nasties don't go near the landscapes because they can't, but player and enemy bullets pass through those spaces so those either need to be allowed for or redesigned out.

 

 

Could be possible. "HAR'em" is almost "Delta" without background graphics. :)

However, I only managed to squeeze 5 8x16 soft-sprites and a 4PMG ship into the available (PAL-)time.

The collision detection, movement of shots (own and enemies) is not to be forgotten. If I remember my tests correctly about 10-14 (blank) scan lines for one sprite.

 

So seven might be possible if the enemies don't shoot?

 

If you finish the first two levels you get a change at replaying the levels at double the speed, and sometimes you notice gfx glitches as there isn't always enough CPU time to run the enemy control routines two times.

So my opinion is: "Delta" Possible? YES. Easy to do? NO :)

 

 

Back to topic: POKEY or SID... I am not a big fan of Hubbard. Not saying I don't like the music, but there is so much music out there which is just better.

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I'm quite a fan of the Ninja music from Mr Hubbard.

 

By the way, doesn't he have a bit of a passing resemblance to Jeff Minter?

 

Ninja?...Last Ninja? Matt Gray

 

IK + deffo RH :)

 

As for Mr Minter, having met Mr Minter in the flesh many many times over the years even before he was famous, NO :)

 

Jeff was a regular visitor of the Vic Centre just behind the BBC in North Acton like myself...Nice bloke too..

 

RH looks more like Mr Bean in real life :)

Edited by Mclaneinc
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Back to topic: POKEY or SID... I am not a big fan of Hubbard. Not saying I don't like the music, but there is so much music out there which is just better.

 

For me RH was very creative, if you listen to Monty on the Run he pulls everything out of the bag, great sounding instruments, wonderful changes of tempo and always on the 'hook'.

 

To me too many people rely on pumping out a long tune with no diversity or an incredible short tune with plenty of it but all too soon over, ok ram was always a realistic barrier for any game maker or musician but Hubbard always seemed to push that envelope...

 

Hence I put him head and shoulders above many but there a huge wealth of chip people who produced stunning music...

Edited by Mclaneinc
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i'm almost with José really, for me the best bet would be to convert the landscapes to characters and everything in the main play area (just shy of 200 scanlines high when landscapes are off, around 110 when on give or take) to software sprites apart from the starfield and player craft. Then you "just" need an efficient software sprite renderer that'll do seven enemies and i think a couple of dozen bullets at 50FPS. The nasties don't go near the landscapes because they can't, but player and enemy bullets pass through those spaces so those either need to be allowed for or redesigned out.

 

i suspect a 128K machine'd be needed since the C64 is fairly close to the brim for graphics and doesn't have to juggle pre-shifts or secondary display buffers and it does mean the colour count is going down overall since the enemies will have to share colours, but i reckon it's viable in some form. i'd worry about the music though...

 

 

 

I bow to your superior knowledge of course my good friend but I suspect it would need a real hard core Atarian t be able to do a conversion (oy Sheddy, you listening :) )

 

As for the music, with the amount of ram needed to support the port the ram for the SID convert engine would be stunning limited :)

 

I'd presume you would need to load custom SID music data and them push it through the convert engine?

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I liked the Ninja tune a lot. It uses the "unique sounding" of POKEY very well. Using arpeggios doesn't make that hard, and you don't want to have any other sounding in there.

I wonder which tunes were really done by RH on the Atari, and which ones were just "note by note" adaptions.

Edited by emkay
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TMR on A8 because our ship and the ball shots are PMGs then they are in distinct colour to any of the grounds and enemys and if you have, lets say PF0 always white to use on the shots it will look better than some of restrictions you'll see on C64 (only a less colourfull starfield and of course that the stars can't be in hi-resolution).

The enemies alone look to max out at around six bullet objects with two being able to move diagonally if the shrapnel ball power-up is enabled - the player is using nine character-based objects at full tilt.

 

I bow to your superior knowledge of course my good friend but I suspect it would need a real hard core Atarian t be able to do a conversion (oy Sheddy, you listening :) )

Oh, no doubt of that; Delta is very much designed around what the C64 hardware does well, so building a version that works away from those comfort zones is going to need someone who really knows what they're doing and preferably at a hardware level. The software sprite engine will make or break the project i reckon...

 

As for the music, with the amount of ram needed to support the port the ram for the SID convert engine would be stunning limited :)

 

I'd presume you would need to load custom SID music data and them push it through the convert engine?

The conversion process eats available CPU grind and that's probably going to be at a premium, so it'd be more efficient to disassemble Hubbard's driver and strip out the part actually dealing with the SID to replace it with a POKEY engine. There are disassemblies of the earlier C64 routine which explain the data formatting and it's quite modular, but that's still a major ask to actually do and, whilst it'd probably work for the title and completion tunes, is likely to mangle the in-game soundtrack.

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Any game is possible on A8, I mean in UK they did it on ZX, ok it looked crappy, but they did it. Ss Delta and Armalyte on A8 with a decent programmer, no prob.

Just because a "crappy" version exists on the Spectrum ([insert subjective argument about playability here]) it doesn't automagically follow that anything that's much less "crappy" could be done for the A8 using similar techniques. And lets be honest here, if someone went for that cheap and cheerless option there'd be a queue forming almost immediately to rip them to shreds for it - i could knock out a version that didn't match the C64's framerate, ran in four colours, needed 128K and dropped the in-game music but, putting my "professional pride" aside for a moment, sometimes i meet folks from this forum and i value my feckin' life too much!

 

As for Armalyte... lets not go there, it's a very different and far more complicated beast.

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Any game is possible on A8, I mean in UK they did it on ZX, ok it looked crappy, but they did it. Ss Delta and Armalyte on A8 with a decent programmer, no prob.

Particular those "C64 optimized" games need predefined setup on the A8. That means: GR. 7 mode, because it has the most cpu cycles per pixel plus the best resolution in colour.

Depending on the game creation, the Gr. 13 Mode had to get used.

For the PMg, flicker has to be accepted.

After a game is running, one could check to add some more details or remove flicker until all CPU is used.

 

In theory, Zybex is "Delta" on the A8, btw.

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