Computer music

-
You may already know that I used to own a Commodore 64, and (as is nearly everyone else who ever owned one) I am still very passionate about the music people used to produce on it.

The question "Which was your favourite Commodore 64 tune" is a very hard one to answer as there are so many good ones out there, and people tend to go for the same short list "Delta", "Sanxion", etc.

However, recently I was creating some ambient background music for a presentation video. It started off a bit like a Jarre tune, but as I started to add in the percussion (for which I used samples of car doors slamming) it started to remind me of a tune from an old C64 game; "Tetris".

After downloading it and listening to it endlessly over and over as I write code I have come to a conclusion; TETRIS is my favourite C64 tune! It is just so unique, and unlike many other C64 tunes it hasn't aged, and doesn't actually sound that much like a C64 tune at all! Whenever I listen to it I feel like I am in the former USSR, building something out of strangely shaped bricks :-)

There's a (large) Mp3 of the tune here if you are interested.

Well done Wally Beben, you have in my opinion created a classic, and I will undoubtedly continue to enjoy it for many years to come. Actually, I am going to do a remix of it too, I hope he wont mind :-)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Connascence

-
I’ve just finished reading What every programmer should know about object oriented design . The first couple of sections are a bit useless really, but the 3rd section is very good. I particularly liked the section on the difference types of connascence in software. There’s some basic information about it here if you fancy a brief overview of what it is about. It’s a really good book, I recommend you read it! Should only take a day if you only read the 3rd section.
Read more

Convert absolute path to relative path

-
Today I needed to convert an absolute path to a relative path based on a specified base path. E.g. c:\a\b\c -> c:\a\b\c\d\file.txt = d\file.txt c:\a\b\c -> c:\a\file.txt = ..\..\file.txt c:\a\b\c -> c:\a\x\file.txt = ..\..\x\file.txt I am surprised there is nothing in the .NET framework so I had a hunt around and converted the code from the following URL ( http://www.vergentsoftware.com/blogs/ckinsman/default.aspx?date=2006-08-07 ) into C#.... private string RelativePath(string absolutePath, string relativeTo) { string[] absoluteDirectories = absolutePath.Split('\\'); string[] relativeDirectories = relativeTo.Split('\\'); //Get the shortest of the two paths int length = absoluteDirectories.Length //Use to determine where in the loop we exited int lastCommonRoot = -1; int index; //Find common root for (index = 0; index if (...
Read more

Printing bitmaps using CPCL

-
I've had no end of grief trying to print a PCX to a Zebra Printer using the CPCL printer language. Silly me, didn't notice the EG command (expanded graphics) so there was no need to convert my BMP to a PCX and then struggle with binary data. I still had a bit of grief working out how to print using the EG command because the documentation is quite frankly crap. The expected command format is EG {WidthInBytes} {HeightInPixels} {XPos} {YPos} {Data}\r\n The printer expects a 1 bit pixel matrix. So if pixel(0, 0) is set you will set "80" in the data. If pixel(0, 0) is set and pixel (7, 0) is also set you would sent "81". Basically what you need to do is to read each set of 8 horizontal pixels and then use bit operations to create a byte value 0..255, and then output this as hex 00..FF. Here's the routine :-) public void DrawBitmap(Bitmap bmp, int xPosition, int yPosition) { if (bmp == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("bmp"); ...
Read more