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The Game Masters

An increasingly popular theory about this universe lately is the one about everything being a simulation. Even Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX boss, believes this to be true. It’s a fascinating but also scary thought that seems to cater to the level of computer technology we have reached these years.

In the previous century, we thought there might be UFO’s. We didn’t always have access to a camera then and our own technological level had risen to a point where we believed it might actually be possible to have levitating saucers from other worlds. Almost no reports from the middle ages? What do they know!?

Now we have smart phones and cameras all abound. So, where are the UFO photos?

Deep down, I believe the simulation theory might become victim of the same fate. It’s an intriguing theory that makes some sense given what we learn from science at the moment, but who knows, one day we might discover or invent something more that will kill this theory in an instant.

Never mind. Guess it wasn’t that after all.

That haven’t stopped myself from playing around with this idea, however. In fact, I have spun a lot of thoughts and rules around the possibility of this all being a simulation controlled by some sort of ardent game masters. There are two aspects to this idea.

April 8, 2017December 18, 2017HTML

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My First Crack at Web Design

I landed on the internet for the first time in 1996, and given my creative nature it didn’t take long before I wanted to have my own web site where I could present my programs and music.

At that point in time I didn’t know the first thing about HTML. Maybe I knew it was built up from tags, but that was pretty much it. So, it had to be WYSIWYG. I fiddled around with Microsoft FrontPage Express, but there was also some sort of WYSIWYG tool built into a specific version of Netscape (the browser of choice for me at the time) that could also build a web page.

I used that tool in Netscape to create my first web site in 1996, and it looked like this.

April 1, 2017February 12, 2020Chiptunes

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Commodore 64 SID

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3SID: C64 SID Music in 9 Voices

While 2SID tunes – SID tunes with 6 voices – are fairly common in the High Voltage SID Collection, 3SID tunes with 9 voices are somewhat of a rarity. I just found out today that there’s not a lot of SID emulators that support them either. SidPlay as well as XMPlay with a SID plug-in refused to play any of them.

Rolf Greven, who compiles the binaries for the Mac version of CheeseCutter, converted all he could find in HVSC update #66 to MP3 files in March 2017. He has given me permission to list them in this blog post. Rolf converted them from three 8580 SID chips playing through HardSID with no post processing.

For me, quite a few of those 3SID tunes sometimes sound like AdLib tunes. There was one 3SID tune where the third SID was only used at few bars throughout the tune just to emphasize percussion by adding some sort of echo to the percussion from one of the other SID chips. I needed to listen to these 3SID tunes a few times before I got rid of the idea that most of them probably also could have been done with two or even one SID chip.Rolf Greven

The playlist have tunes from Mihály Horváth from Hungary (Hermit, the coder of SID-Wizard), Gaetano Chiummo from Italy, and Jake Manley (Jellica).

April 1, 2017June 24, 2019Tracker Music

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Amiga

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My Amiga MOD Music

I never made much in the line of the original MOD files on Amiga. When the first SoundTracker emerged on Amiga, I made five awful tunes in 1987. And in 1993, I made two short test tunes while developing my MOD player on PC. I’ve posted these seven MOD files here more out of curiosity and laughs as there’s not a lot to be impressed about musically.

As always, the MOD files have been saved as MP3 for easy listening.

March 25, 2017June 24, 2019Chiptunes

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AdLib

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AdLib Music by Jozz

The Danish pianist Johannes Bjerregaard not only composed great C64 tunes, he also created a lot of AdLib tunes in 1991-93 in his own players. There were two different player systems – the early JBM player with about 9 tunes, and SEQPLAY that recorded songs through MIDI.

This blog post contains all of these AdLib tunes, of course saved as MP3 for easy listening.

March 19, 2017March 19, 2017Chiptunes Hardware

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Commodore 64 SID Yamaha

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Yamaha Reface CP

After creating my first SID tune in 25 years, I knew I had to get some sort of keyboard to test out leaders and chords. I didn’t want to get a big one as I didn’t have much room on my desk, and I didn’t expect to spend hours solely performing on it as I’m not brilliant at that anyway. A tiny one just to test out stuff would be just fine with me.

Luck had it that just a few streets away from my workplace in the center of Copenhagen, there was a renowned keyboard shop with tons of keyboards of all types and sizes. After checking things out for a while, I quickly decided not to get a small MIDI keyboard. These kinds of things tend to want an external sound source and I wanted it to have its own sound and loudspeakers.

That’s when the new Yamaha Reface series caught my eyes.

March 17, 2017December 23, 2023Chiptunes SID

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Commodore 64 SID

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SID: Downtown

Here’s my second SID tune, this time in standard PAL speed for the 8580 SID chip.

Here’s the DeepSID entry if you want to listen to the SID file itself.

Here’s a YouTube video recorded on real C64 hardware:

And here’s the discussion about it on Facebook.

March 11, 2017December 18, 2017Chiptunes

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AdLib Commodore 64 SID Sound Blaster

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Old C64/PC Player/Editor Notes

While researching and compiling notes, papers and timelines for my 5-part series about my computer chronicles, I scanned a lot of old notes I made back in the 80’s and 90’s for my music players and editors on C64 and PC. There are also a few letters and other interesting tidbits as well. I didn’t find a place to include them in the chronicles but I thought I wouldn’t want to let the scanning go to waste, so here they are.

Unfortunately a lot of the ideas are almost solely in Danish. I apologize for not translating it, but it would have been a mammoth task. A few letters and an article are in English, though. There are five separate galleries, so remember to scroll down to start the next one.

I’m not sure how useful this is to anyone else but me – but for what it’s worth, here they are.

February 19, 2017January 15, 2024Chiptunes SID

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Commodore 64 SID

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The Road to my First SID Tune in 25 Years

Publishing my Computer Chronicles lately gave me a lot of positive response and it dawned on me how much the C64 scene still remembered and respected me for the editor and music I did back in the day. Not that I had been totally oblivious to it. That has been almost impossible on Facebook. I now have more than 750 friends there, and of course most of them have befriended me because of my past on the C64. I have been practically dragged into several C64 and Amiga Facebook groups, whether I wanted to or not. I just accepted it. Maybe there would be some nostalgia to check up on from time to time.

All these years, however, I always considered the C64 a thing of the past. A closed chapter. Now we have computers that are so much faster and produce so much better material, it’s not even funny. I considered the C64 a product of its time and instead spent my years making web sites and playing a ton of PC games. I had high hopes for some of the web sites and fan game sections I wrote, but none of them created much of a stir. It was pretty much letdown after letdown. There were a few dedicated visitors, but actually spawn discussions and spreading the word all around? Almost non-existent.

Just rolling tumbleweeds.

Especially my latest endeavor, the GameDeed web site, was almost always a major disappointment. I was actually arrogant enough to believe that a table layout would make it a strong contender among the likes of Backloggery and Howlongtobeat. Instead it immediately went for a small niche corner with less than half a dozen visitors per day. I even tried to fix this several times. Maybe if I added Steam synchronization? No? Perhaps if I added an export function? Still nothing? Then how about if I add a ton of C64 games?

Epiphanies

All these fiascos really got to me in the end and I finally decided to freeze all further development on the GameDeed web site. I played some more PC games instead and wrote a lot of blog posts about them, but again the feedback was somewhat sparse.

The hell with it, I then thought. Now I’ll do something for myself for once.

January 28, 2017March 18, 2023PC Games

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RPG The Witcher

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The Witcher 3: Leftovers

Developer: CD Projekt RED | Released: 2016 | Genre: RPG, Third Person

I completed the main story of The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine (the second expansion pack) in the end of December 2016 and wrote a blog post about it, but I still had a few question marks and secondary quests to finish off and I did so in January. I must say that some of these secondary quests were really funny and absolutely worth completing. I’ll get into detail about some of them in the spoiler section below.

It also turned out that there were a few additions to the game that I had not discovered yet in my previous blog post. One was the “Hanse” bases – unique map icons of fortified castles or caves swarming with bandits. Clearing these out could be challenging, especially if some of the bandits managed to light signal fires to call upon reinforcements. A base cleared out would be followed up by a short cutscene of soldiers taking over the place. Bandits in the surrounding areas would then have dispersed.

Another change was that clearing out a town had a different cutscene. In the vanilla game, villagers would immediately walk in and settle down. Now Geralt started meditating instead, a timelapse of a day passing by was shown, and as Geralt came back to his senses, villagers were now living and working there. It made sense that the developers wanted to make this change. The previous cutscene felt like the villagers were just outside the combat area, waiting for Geralt to finish off the monsters.

“Great, he killed them – let’s go!”