The 1-Bit Forum — Spectrum Music like Earth Shaker

Re: Spectrum Music like Earth Shaker

2015-12-03T01:24:42Z

Welcome aboard, great to see you here

Love your Full Throttle 2 tune. There's a very good recording of included in the ZX music bank.
I played it recently in the retro section in one of my 1-bit radio broadcasts on the wonky FM radio station.

The spectrum related stuff you uploaded to soundcloud is great too

Re: Spectrum Music like Earth Shaker

2015-12-02T21:45:14Z

Wow, that is even more hardcore than composing in assembler! Hmmm, next time you feel like composing something with your routine (and I very much hope you do feel like that sometimes ), have a look at this software. Being familiar with trackers, you might find that a little more convenient than hacking in DATA statements, hehe. I'm not sure if it provides the same level of flexibility though.

Also yes, the Arc of Yesod tune is quite a gem

Re: Spectrum Music like Earth Shaker

2015-12-02T15:08:27Z

how did I compose the music - hmmm yeah I just used to put in in as numbers in READ and DATA statements (and still do in fact whenever I use that routine). I had a list of frequencies blu-tacked on the wall, or maybe on the Galaxians arcade cabinet that used to take up half of my bedroom. I wrote the whole of Earth Shaker like that, just poking in numbers I'd looked up in the back of the Spectrum manual when I worked at Zeppelin a couple of the guys there took pity and gave me an assembler.
The Earth Shaker tune was obviously a bit influenced by the one in Arc of Yesod, which I loved. I remember trying to only use chords and notes which sounded good played by the routine, as some verged on the grindy Manic Miner chords. I noticed that mathematically pairs of numbers which are coprime (have no common factors) often generate the best chords because the chord then lasts longer before it repeats. You could even make it sound like triplets if the frequency repeated at the right interval, which I used at the end of one of the sections.
Wouldn't hold your breath for a World Shaker ZX release though - it's something I would love to do but realistically with a full time job, two daughters and all the other million things I do I'll pencil in a tentative July 2045!

Re: Spectrum Music like Earth Shaker

2015-12-02T13:17:16Z

I like the "Earth Shaker - Game Complete" tune, and especially how the phasing of a single note evolves.

Re: Spectrum Music like Earth Shaker

2015-12-01T13:07:21Z

Welcome to the 1-bit forum! Great to have you aboard.

Very happy to hear those unreleased 1-bit tracks! The tracker conversions are excellent as well. I'm not much of a gamer myself, but I think some people would go nuts if World Shaker ZX was to be released one day. Seems the PC version was never widely distributed either?

Also, how did you compose the music back in the day, actually? Did you hard-code it all in asm?

Spectrum Music like Earth Shaker

2015-12-01T08:07:55Z

Thanks irrlicht project for inviting me to the forum

I uploaded some spectrum-related music to SoundCloud last night
https://soundcloud.com/abandonware/tracks, some is 1-bit and some
tracker-based versions if anyone is interested in listening.

Michael Batty
(spectrum programmer back in the day:
Earth Shaker, Full Throttle 2, Tai Chi Tortoise etc.)