BleepCast / Phil´s Blog » Games

Street Fighter 2 & Not So Much Free Time

Phil Strahl — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 22:29:15 +0000

So I did it again, but this time with a different game: After ripping the music-instrument samples from F-Zero and creating a soundfont out of it, I attempted just the same with Street Fighter 2 for the Super Nintendo. If you’re looking for some technical insights in Capcom’s SNES music, wanna listen to some music or just the frickin’ download for the soundfont, you’ve come to the right place!

Same ol’, same ol’

This time ripping the sounds from the SPC files wasn’t new to me, and I won’t go into all the details like last time (if you’re interested, just visit the previous posting).

The New Shit

What was different, however, were the samples present in the files: In F-Zero sound files, basically every sample was loaded with every song, whether used or not. In F-Zero’s case this wasn’t a major problem since the samples were really small, but with Street Fighter 2 this habit began to change a bit: The majority of samples was present in all SPC-files as well, but in the sample-registers 46 and 47, and occasionally 45, were different samples in different arenas, like wood-block and shamisen in the E. Honda’s bathhouse; or sitar in Dhalsim’s temple. In practice this meant listening closely to each song and surveying the sample-number for new samples in familiar places in the register.

Shoryou-! …

Additionally I could also find out which fighters had been in the stage when the SPC file had been dumped from the game, because the sound-samples of the fighters were in them as well — heavily chopped up and four times the speed than they were played in the game; probably another means to save memory. For example, Ryu’s “Hadouken!” cry consists of two separate samples, “Hadou!” and “Ken!”, so that the latter can also be used after the “Shoryou!”-sample for the Shoryouken-move. Seems like it really pays off having played (and listened) to this game 18 years ago or so.

Soundfonting

I did just like I did a few days back, converting the samples to 44.1 kHz, recreating the loops and ASDR-envelopes and putting the new instruments in a soundbank with the Viena soundfont editor.

But the most annoying part in Viena is to construct a GM-compatible drumset, where all the right drum samples are in the right pitch mapped onto the right key. The thing is, that there’s a lot of recycling going on in the SNES-tunes and this over-complicates things in the editor. So for example for the toms you have to add the same sample like six times to the “Drums”-instrument. And in Viena such tasks become a tedious click-orgy.

Progression

Compared to F-Zero there are a lot more real-world instrument samples to find, especially for the drums. The Street Fighter 2 percussion includes:

A snare drum,
finally a decent bass (kick) drum,
a tom-tom,
a crash cymbal, although with an audible looping point,
a ride cymbal, used as hi-hats solely in the Sagat stage.
claves,
a bongo (used in Blanka’s stage)
a synth clapping sound for Zangief’s stage (the other analog-sounding drums are just pitched snare and bass drum samples)
a wood-block sound, also in Honda’s stage.

Yet still: FM synthesized samples are plenty also with this score, but slowly there was a trend emerging of refraining from familiar FM-syth-sounds and towards more realistic, albeit memory-intense, real-instrument samples. It is 1992 we’re talking about, after all.

All things considered, the more samples make the drums much more versatile than those from F-Zero, although I just adore that hearty snare drum there.

Fill ‘em up

Another major difference to the F-Zero is the sheer density in sound-layers. Nintendo’s racing title just used four of the Super Nintendo’s eight simultaneous playback-channels solely for music playback, Street Fighter 2 seven, sometimes all eight! But I guess that’s okay, since the only other sound-samples are punches, groans and special-move shouts and if there’s a very subtle channel pausing for the second Ryu gets punched in the face or Chun-Li yells “Spinning Bird Kick!” so be it.

And the channels are packed! There hardly is any silence in either of them when the music is busy. Even solo-ing only three channels sound like four or five: Capcom’s sound team really packed the tracks with so much stuff that it’s almost a bit too much, in my opinion…

Some Music, eh?

But enough with the the chewing of technical facts and limitations, let’s hear some music! And instead of trying to recreate the tracks we all know by heart, I played a bit with my SNES sound-fonts so far and came up with two new original songs in the style of real old-school SNES music.

This one is my F-Zero tribute, take a listen:

Black Gulch (F-Zero Tribute) by sephcarissa

And the track below is the music to my fictitious stage, also a humble attempt at trying to catch the flair of Street Fighter 2′s score.

Seph’s Stage (Street Fighter 2 Tribute) by sephcarissa

Donwload and Donation

And there are a few of you who are just here for getting their hands on my soundfont, so I thought I give it away for a donation. Have fun! And thanks for listening and reading, y’all!

	Click the Image to download my SNES Street Fighter 2 Soundfont

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

PS: If you love the meticulously hand-pixeled arenas as much as I do, you might wanna visit this site!

F-Zero & Too Much Free Time

Phil Strahl — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 01:55:52 +0000

Today was National Day in Austria and I had some free time on my hands. That’s why I tried hard not to get some work done today. “I’ll be messing around with my Super Nintendo,” I told Conny. And she said “Alright. Have fun with it.” And I did. But in a totally unexpected way. Read on if you want to learn about F-Zero and a little about the making of its music…

Today I really wanted to indulge my mind in some mindless gaming after having watched a couple of Street Fighter 2 Ending scenes, but there was a tiny little thing I wanted to try first: I had an inspiration of it a couple of days ago and now I finally had the time to try it out.

The Backstory

Recently I had the opportunity to create some SNES-styled music for a game of my friend Jot, the Game Designer. I already had some Super-Nintendo-game-soundfonts but all of them were more than ten years old and had lots and lots of missing samples or just bad samples in it. So gathering all the sweet SNES instruments I wanted to use in my composition was rather exhausting and the result sounded a bit patchy as well to me.

The Idea

So what did I think of? Well, I wanted to create a soundfont myself from a couple of SNES music files I had lying around in my extensive chipmusic archive. “How hard can it be?” I thought with a smirk to myself, “Maybe I’ll do three or four games in the next hour or so,” I thought. “Because this can’t take long; an hour tops,” I thought. This was eight hours ago.

The Realization

Part One: Research

Ages ago I ripped some sound samples from Jurassic Park for a remix I did back then, but ended up never using them. I remember using a command-line program that would harvest the samples from the game-ROM. That I was looking for.

But, alas, software from ten years ago is hard to find and I gave it up when I learned that I was helplessly living in the past, because today everything comes with a user interfaces and features: The SPCTool v0.7 (download) from 2004 was a bit buggy but otherwise just marvelously up to today’s task: It highlights used samples in a song, lets you preview the samples (with loop-points!) and batch-export selected samples either as compressed SNES-wave files or — yay! — standard Windows PCM WAV files. I loaded up my favorite F-Zero SPC file, Big Blue and hit play. It was great, I could see which sample was used in which channel while listening to the song. So I selected all the samples and hit Export.

I only needed an editor to create my soundfont with. Ten years ago I was busy with the Vienna Soundfont Studio but couldn’t find a working version for my operating system anymore. Time flies by… Yet again I stumbled across a superior alternative, namely Viena. What the program was lacking in n-letters in its name, it made up for with an incredibly feature-rich and easy to navigate interface. I was delighted once again!

Troubles?

Importing the WAVs I had exported from the SPCTool was a little troublesome. Either that or I had no clue what I was doing. In any case I figured that it might be a problem that the exported files had an odd sample-rate, something just below 22,050 Hz. So I now was in need of something that would help me batch-convert my ancient Japanese sample-files to 44,100 Hz.

Since I am a proficient Googler I found what I was looking for in no-time, the r8brain Sample Converter, free of charge and despite the fugly UI quite useful.

Getting to grips with it

The estimated hour I thought I would be spending with it was almost over and I didn’t even have a single sample ready. I looked at the clock again and it wasn’t that late. I had plenty of time to play around and get a closer look at how the folks at Nintendo set up their compositions. Yes, I felt like Indiana Jones, digging up some treasure from the past…

Learning from the Japanese Masters

Memory was tight back in the days and F-Zero was a launch title of the Super Nintendo, so it had to look and sound good without breaking the mold of the memory. I guess nobody would have thought back in 1990 how much data you could stuff into a SNES game-pak. So what did Yumiko Kameya and Naoto Ishida, F-Zero‘s sound-designers and composers do — apart from an incredibly good job? They tried to use as little memory for music samples as possible. In fact, all the samples in their original SNES data-format where just a bit over 100 kb. In today’s world that’s almost nothing. Even back in the days all the music-samples of the game would fit onto a 3.25″ floppy disk no less than thirteen times!

Interestingly they tried to use as little “real-world” recordings from instruments as possible: Only

trumpet,
french horn,
alto saxophone,
Hammond organ,
Slap Bass

and five drum samples — that’s all. The rest are synth-sounds (yes, even the warm E-bass), and some of them sound awfully much like FM-synthesized sounds. Around 1990 FM-Synthesis was state of the art: Soundcards for personal computers (if they had any) would synthesize MIDI-instruments that way, the SEGA Genesis (released in 1988) was keen with it and even Konami developed at the time their VRC-7 chip for NES games. The chip would provide the composer (and gamer) with six additional FM-synth-channels to the standard NES sound. So the SNES was something totally cutting edge with its eight sample-fed channels when it launched. But back to the game. Have a listen to the samples and how frickin’ short they are:

F-Zero Sound Samples by sephcarissa

And yes, there were only five drum samples in the whole game:

A snare,
a rimshot (I have absolutely no idea where it was used, to be honest),
a closed hi-hat,
a semi-closed hi-hat,
and a medium tom.

If you’re into making music yourself, you might have noticed that one basic drum is missing — the bass drum. So how the hell did they get away with that in the game? As it turned out, they pitched the tom-sound down a couple of semi-tones and used the result as a feasible bass drum sound. Oh boy, sample-memory must have seemed really small 21 years ago!

But the most interesting sound was the noise of the wind in the track Death Wind. It is very creative: First they used a noise-sample that’s so short, it sounds more like a castanet-clap than anything else. At first I didn’t even rip that sample because I thought it was junk. I mean, listen to it above (it’s the one on the bottom of the play-list).
So they took that sample and pitched it down, down and even further down to the core of Earth itself so it transformed from almost nothing into an eerie, three-second long humm. But they didn’t stop there: On top of it loops an equally down-pitched and stretched sample; the semi-closed hi-hat sample.
Oh how do I bow before thee, Kameya-san and Ishida-san! And needless to say that I had my fun recreating this for my soundfont.

When I was trying to recreate the loop-points in Viena from the samples, I realized how tight they were, some even shorter than a the tenth of a second! And this meant trouble:
I don’t know how much you have worked with sound-samples yourself so let me tell you: If you loop a very short sound sample, it begins to change its pitch. The more so, the shorter your loop is. This becomes a problem when you only have a single sample for one note (usually C’) that you want the hardware to pitch up and down so that you can use it for all notes. This really was a problem and is also the reason why I didn’t quite get some slight off-key sounds out of my soundfont. Of course, I only realized this when I was testing my soundfont out after hours of key-mapping and creating ADSR envelopes off the top of my head.

Yes, this was another problem: To keep the file-size small, many samples were so short that it was hard to figure out where they belonged, i.e. for what instrument they were used for. And since they all were synthesized, it was even harder: It’s easy to distinguish a piano-tone from an organ, for example, even if your sample is just a quarter of a second long. But if you have a synthesized sound you’re lost. More so, if there is a number of them, all sounding very similar. Whew!

The only thing you can do is listen to the songs then in SPCTool, muting and solo-ing different channels during playback and keeping a close eye on the entry that tells you what sample-number is currently playing. So with that approach I figured out most instruments and ADSR-envelopes over the course of two or three hours or so.

The Field-Testing

From VGmusic.com, my favorite game-MIDI archive for over a decade now, I downloaded some artfully recreated music-tracks from the game as MIDI-sheet music and imported them into Reason. There I created some NN-XT sample players and fed them with my soundfont’s instruments to test them out. Holy cow, that was awful at first! No instrument was in proper key, some I had forgotten entirely and with others I messed up the envelopes because I took them for a different instrument than they actually were. It sounded like the devil himself took an AVGN-like diarrhea-dump onto those sacred compositions and was mocking me. So back to Viena for some envelope-tweaking, back to Audacity for some hand-tuning of the samples (Viena‘s correctional settings didn’t quite work with Reason) and back to SPCTool to listen to the originals over and over again.

Engaged and analytic listening of your favorite music for hours really separates the wheat from the chaff: If you still can listen to the tracks the next day without your eardrums vomiting, then you truly are listening to outstanding music.

During that back and forth between three applications (which don’t quite enjoy each others presence and demand of sole reign over the soundcard) really was exhausting and quite often I spotted errors in the MIDI files I used as framework. Since I am a merciless perfectionist I spent also quite some time ironing out those inconsistencies as good as I could.

The Presentation

“So what does it sound like?!” I hear you asking. Fear not: Below is the playlist just for you. All the tracks in it are recreations from my bitterly crafted soundfont and the rigorously corrected MIDI files from VGmusic.com.

My F-Zero Soundfont by sephcarissa

If you want to compare these to the originals (provided those aren’t etched into your mind), I suggest you get started with this playlist where you will find it all.

The Acquirement

And if you want to play around with the soundfont on your own, I am happy to release it on this very blog under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike License:

	Click the Image to download my SNES F-Zero Soundfont

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Hello? Still Alive?

Phil Strahl — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 22:24:00 +0000

It’s been a while since my last update and a lot has happened. In fact, the less that happens around here on this blog, the more is happening with my outside life. Wow, I just realized that this is the first time that I apologized that I had a life outside the web. Anyways: I bet you’re incredibly curious about what has been happening since my last update? Read on, I keep it short and funny. I promise!

Okay, I lied, but it should be at least funny.

A bit.

So this is what happened:

So after my last post I spent some more nice days in Berlin, got treated unfairly by Air Berlin and spent eight more hours than expected at Tegel Airport but met a nice couple from Salzburg that just got engaged in Berlin. In fact, I was just fifty meters away when Stefan proposed to Julia in the Mauerpark. I was busy looking for presents for me, my friends and myself. So one woman got a ring and I got some games for my Atari 2600 — everybody was happy.

Back in Salzburg I had a shower and the next day drove to my lovely and talented digital-artist-girlfriend in Tyrol where she stayed with her parents for a couple of weeks. Whereas Berlin was cool and rainy, Tyrol greeted me with hotness and sunshine. And Conny and I walked and even hiked quite a bit. Her family was super-friendly and it was a nice vacation from my vacation.

Not so long after I had my birthday, my very good friend Jot, the game designer finally moved out of the campus with his girlfriend. Not long after I witnessed with Conny the last few of her colleagues’ Bachelor exam. It was that day when Joey, head of the animation department at the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences, asked me to manage the students starting this year in the animation master course, since “you are in the project-management master class anyway.” I agreed and so the semester started for us a bit early but creatively.

Hey, and I bought my dream-woman a shiny ring with a shiny stone and asked her to move in together when we’re through with our Master’s degrees. And — yaaaay! — she agreed!

And before we knew we were sitting amidst about a hundred people in the biggest lecture hall for the introductory presentation of the Master’s curriculum. I am not afraid to say: Finally! As a student at the FH Salzburg I’m as happy as a lark and started out way too keen to do well, taking notes, reading up on topics and managing the animators. Hell, even the night-shifts at the Red Bull Media House in conjunction with very early courses the following days don’t scare me, they just exhaust me a little. But hey, I can sleep when I’m dead, right?! ~~Which may happen sooner rather than later if I keep up this lifestyle.~~

Gadgetwise

Yeeees, this is the part where I let my electronic bling shine: As said before, Berlin was a retro-computing kick-starter and I returned with an Atari 2600 Jr. plus some cartridges in my hand luggage. The Atari still works, as Jot and I found out in one heavily documented gaming evening. It was a load of fun, despite the very noisy TV-picture which made it hard to make out what was noise and what was a bullet.

Then, of course, Propellerhead put out a new release of Reason wich now integrates Record plus at last a studio-grade mixer and 64-bit support. Sugoi! But the most awaited gadget arrived a few days earlier, something I had waited for almost two years since I first saw it in a YouTube video. It finally shipped to my address from Hong Kong and despite the odds (UPS’ inability to find my address for four years, UPS’ finally calling me with the instructions where I should go to retrieve my package, plus UPS’ invoice charging me additional fees to the already royal amount that customs already took from me) I had it in my hands: The Misa Digital Instrumets Kitara, a fully digital guitar with built-in synth behind a multi-touch panel running Linux. Yes, the awesomeness was oozing from every inch of its black and shiny polymer body. As soon as I had some time I plugged it in and realized that I had neither a clue nor innate talent in playing this instrument. But DANG! I’m looking gooooood with it!

Recently I grew increasingly annoyed with HTC’s Android distribution on my mobile phone, the Desire Z or G2: Buggy audio profiles, promoted applications like Amazon MP3 you couldn’t delete and an insatiable hunger for memory. Once I was fed up enough I posted my misery on Google+, asking for advice on how to flash the device with a custom ROM. I got the answer, got it up and running (I might lay out the details of it some time since it was way harder than anticipated) after four hours and was so happy that I also flashed the firmware of my Canon 5D Mk. II with Magic Lantern. My recommendations for both ROMs.

Anything else?

Well… no. Not really. But at least I got some little creative stuff done, like a SNES-music track for a boss fight in a game my dear friend Jot, the Game Designer is working on. I thought my piece is sub-standard, mediocre crap but he likes it. Poor fella. Lost his mind obviously.

Another thing I always wanted to try was programming apps for my Android phone. Installing the development environment was so tedious and complicated that I really congratulated myself when I got it to work, because I thought that it was the hardest part of my career as a successful programmer. Oh, how wrong I was: After two or three days of heavy research I was at least able to code an “app” that force-closed when you tapped any of its sparse user-interface widgets. A few days later I realized that it might be a good idea to properly learn Java before attempting to code The Best App In The World. I got me a book (thanks Conny for advising me in the bookstore!), I got my head wrapped around that whole object-oriented crap (hey, at least no pointers, headers and memory management like with C++) and I even managed to code an arrow that one could control like a car from a top-down perspective. That’s where I stopped for now.

But I got back to my Android phone, but this time more on a creative side. When you got root-access of your phone and a custom ROM, there’s not much you can’t do — gawd, I love Android for it’s openness…

So?

So that’s it in a nutshell. If there’s any possibility that you might have read it all and not just clicked the photos in half-hearted anticipation of seeing something shareable on Facebook, I want to congratulate you and apologize for taking away all those precious minutes from your life-clock. More to come soon. Maybe. If I find the time.

♫ My Friend, the Game Designer

Phil Strahl — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 07:47:08 +0000

A good friend of mine is a game designer who designs actual games, and recently he asked me for one little favor which made me feel honored at first but also a little clueless on second thought, stressed in the process and eventually set me under creative pressure. But in the end everything turned out well…

Creating Games Back Then

So Jot is a game designer, isn’t that great? We had a little chat about how it all began and he was raving about an ancient program by Europress Software called Klik & Play. And boy, how well and dear do I remember that program! I got it as limited shareware with one of the first PC magazines with CD-ROMs, actually from one titled “PC Spiel mit CD-ROM” that literally translates to “PC-Game with CD-ROM” (I even blogged about it!). With this software you could create simple games across various screens, with your own animations, your own game mechanics and your own story. It was like Mario Paint on meth. To me as a 12-year old it was creative heaven.
The limitation of the demo was only in content, you didn’t have as many pre-animated sprites and backgrounds to choose from and your games were limited to only two or three screens¹. But the successive issues of PC-Spiel mit CD-ROM supplied me with games by other homebrew-creators: There was a real-time Worms clone, a game where you had to break out of prison and escape the police or a medieval fighting game. Best of all: I could open those games in K&P and, voilà, I dodged the screen count limitation of the shareware version. As a kid I obviously was pretty handy levering out that kinda stuff. I even went through the hassle to rework some of the original games with better graphics, sounds and animations. As a kid I was also an obvious smart-ass. But it was fun. Like Mario Paint on meth.

The successor of Klik & Play was the Games Factory and ultimately Multiumedia Fusion, the software that Jot is currently using to make his many games.

Pitiri or the importance of being obsessed

About two years ago Jot started working more or less alone on his awesome retro-styled jump ‘n’ run called Pitiri; although ‘retro’ in the sense of 1970′s hairdo and music, not so much ‘retro’ in the sense of chunky pixels in stunning three colors. No, Pitiri is different, yet so comfortably familiar.

When I visited Jot his room’s walls were plastered with designs of levels and enemies and the game-flow itself, hell, they still *are*! It took him many months and hundreds of hours to create the world and narrative of Pitiri. Apart from the intro, some sounds and graphic assets he did everything himself, occasionally having a fistful of friends as unpaid beta-testers. I was lucky and honored to be among them and gave poor Jot a hell of a time with my many pages of bug-reports for a simple single level. I’m a smartass, at least that’s what people keep telling me. Jot also composed and performed every musical piece in the game and, until I learned about that, I could swear I heard some old but good Neil Young song in the beginning.

The game still isn’t finished but what I have seen and experienced so far from Eli’s quest for his abducted brother I can assure you it’s gonna be great! I mean I talked with a robot, traveled in space and could turn myself into fire! Even at the same time, if I wanted to!

The requests

I am a big fan of independent artists, regardless of their medium. So I like to help out Jot occasionally with my ruthless selflessness … ahem. Okay, who am I kidding? I do it for the fame, the money and the girls²!

For example, Jot needed a “playful, computer-styled retro font” so I spent one or two afternoons with my sketchbook in my favorite café and designed him a font I titled Digital Disco despite the fact that there’s already a font by that name, as I learned much later after a quick Google search.

If you’re interested in my font, you can get it here as donation ware, which means you can have it for free but not clicking either the Flattr, the Kachingle or the PayPal Donate button makes Baby Jesus and Baby Moses cry. And nobody wants that, right?

But there was a new request: A couple of days ago my good friend Jot from ilikescifi.com told me about a new game of his in beta, called “Aratatatt” which will be available in the near future on the interwebz (I keep you up to date). It’s a jump and shoot in a post-apocalyptic world populated by evil robots. Since the game was all retro again (the synth-pop and new-wave soundtrack by none other than Jot himself) it featured a level boss. And Jot wanted 8-bit sound for it and asked me if I could supply him with a loopable chiptune that would last a good 40 seconds at least.

That’s what he told me via Steam when we were roaming our individual irradiated wasteland of the Mojave desert of Fallout New Vegas. As I was in a tough fight in Vault 3 with some fiends I got the guideline from Jot: “I’d love it to be just like a great Metroid-like showdown. I want 8-bit metal!”. I walked in the rearmost chamber of the vault with my companions Rex and Cass as I heard another message come in from Jot: “It’d be great in the next two days or so!” Only two days?! I took down Motor Runner with a skilled headshot and exited the game. I had work to do.

The tune

I switched on my Yamaha keyboard and launched the magnificent FamiTracker, a capable tracker that allows anybody interested and nerdy enough to make her or his own NES-compatible chiptunes with it, and hit some notes. It sounded terrible. I took some more time to tweak on my instruments, to come up with a rhythm and melody, hit the keys and — major suckage again. After an hour I was in grave despair and spent the following hour looking for kick and snare drum samples to use in the DPCM channel. Luckily end-boss-8bit-metal has a fairly straight-forward percussion. Really bland.

Then I tried coming up with a melody or at least a rough direction to the sampled drums, using the noise channel for hi-hats. Nada. I was incredibly frustrated until I decided to listen to some game soundtracks in my vast library. I hit gold when I dug up the soundtrack to Legend of Xanadu. The first part in my tune is largely based on the track JEMEUX MOUVAIS in the game, whereas the intro was inspired a little by XARKAS although my lacking proficiency in chiptuning really shows when you compare my tune to these two songs.

So finally I could start with the first part and it sounded really good and I got really far by my standards: 20 seconds. And absolutely no clue how to stretch it to 40 seconds. So I sat there, in front of the computer, the sun already up again. That’s when I went to bed. Luckily I was on a night shift the next day. So when I came back from work around 3 a.m. the next day I sat straight to my Mac and moonlighted color grading on some another project. Whenever I had graded enough shots for a decent render time, I switched to composing on the chiptune until the next batch of shots was ready to be colored. Despite what anybody’s common sense would imply, this back-and-forth of two totally different demands was highly effective and I managed to compose two patterns of nice breaks for the tune. This helped me out another 10 or so seconds but I still wasn’t very close to 40, and again, out of ideas.

That was when I really took the coward’s exit and after half the song I just transposed everything up one note and repeated what I had so far with some minor variations. I played it and took the time. Almost 50 seconds for the loop. I was free! And the sun had already risen again. But I wanted to be sure that it would sound good enough for Jot, so I copied the compiled song onto a CF-card, popped it into the PowerPak and turned on my TV. I wanted to know what it sounded like on a real NES.

It sounded holey, a lot of instruments weren’t playing and I was pissed. I went back to the tracker and tweaked around the omitted sounds in the hope of eradicating the problem. I don’t know what I did but the next time it worked. Like a charm. And it sounded really thick and familiar. Thanks to the system’s bias to let the song more or less completely clip and apply a rather stringent low-pass filter. But it was an analogue and warm clipping and the low-pass only made it less clicky.

As soon as I was done I sent it off to Jot and awaited his reaction. I was really hoping that I didn’t disappoint him too profoundly but a couple of hours I got his feedback: “shit phil it works so fucking well! you gonna love it. shit! thanks.”

Despite all the profanity it’s still the best reaction I ever got to a chiptune of my own. And since it is now officially Jot-approved I thought I might share it with you. You can listen to it here or even download the .NSF-file below. Enjoy! And you might want to click the Flattr or Kachingle button…

Seph Carissa – Showdown. 2010.
Download audio file (seph_carissa_-_showdown.mp3)
No player? Try this.

³
Download .NSF

Klik & Play didn’t support scrolling although some smart and crafty nerds found a way to fake it, yes, even fake parallax scrolling. Hacking at its best! ↩
In fact there’s only one. ↩
Icon by RaiderXXX ↩

BleepCast – Level 8

Phil Strahl — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:00:32 +0000

Oh my god — it’s a bonus level! It’s a bonus to past BleepCast levels where I want to add a few of things or just pop in particular personal perspectives. And now there’s finally a way to do so! This bonus level deals with some awesome music for the SNES I totally forgot to play; and then there was this… misconception in BleepCast Level 1 that I need to fix — bleep-style!

Level Information:

This level occupies 13 MB in your memory and has a time limit of 14:14 min.
This podcast is EXPLICIT because I of my occasional pottymouthism.

If you like it then feel free to click the Flattr button on this site, follow the BleepCast on Twitter and/or drop me a comment. Thanks!

BleepCast by Phil Strahl is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

BleepCast – Level 7

Phil Strahl — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 13:00:33 +0000

This is the BleepCast on Rob Hubbard, part two. Everything you want to know about the man that taught the Commodore 64 to produce grand sound-scapes and catchy tunes amidst the incoherent 8-bit turds coated with incompetence in the early 80′s. We will hear his later music, hear him talk about his time in the US and why he eventually came back. Don’t miss it!

Level Information:

This level occupies 51.5 MB in your memory and has a time limit of 56:27 min.
This podcast is for once NOT EXPLICIT because I could keep my f**king mouth shut – yaaay!

More information about the games Hubbard made music for, including cover art and personal experiences by the author at The Commodore Zone.
An Interview with Rob Hubbard from 2001 by Neil Carr.
A really comprehensive Interview with Rob Hubbard on c64.com
Rob Hubbard’s unabridged speech at the “Assembly 2002” Demo Party in Finland, found in stormblast0891’s YouTube channel.
Rob Hubbard’s Wikipedia page. Somebody should edit it with additional information!
An interview from 1997 with Rob who was still at Electronic Arts back then.
Not the Rob Hubbard you’re looking for.
An awesome amount of remixes of Rob’s tunes at remix.kwed.org.
Too lazy for browsing the High-Voltage SID Collection? Here are almost all of Rob Hubbard’s SID tunes.
The starting point for your own research.

If you like it then feel free to click the Flattr button on this site, follow the BleepCast on Twitter and/or drop me a comment. Thanks!

BleepCast by Phil Strahl is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

BleepCast – Level 6

Phil Strahl — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 13:00:06 +0000

Two words that describe this and the next BleepCast: Rob Hubbard. The man that taught the Commodore 64 to produce grand sound-scapes and catchy tunes amidst the incoherent 8-bit turds coated with incompetence in the early 80′s. This level is huge, so it’s clipped into two. And you better stock up on extra lives and get ready to enjoy Hubbard’s music, hear Hubbard’s voice and lean about the man in a tenaciously researched podcast. This is part one.

Level Information:

This level occupies 41.5 MB in your memory and has a time limit of 45:27 min.
This podcast is EXPLICIT because occasionally I get quite profane…

More information about the games Hubbard made music for, including cover art and personal experiences by the author at The Commodore Zone.
An Interview with Rob Hubbard from 2001 by Neil Carr.
A really comprehensive Interview with Rob Hubbard on c64.com
Rob Hubbard’s unabridged speech at the “Assembly 2002” Demo Party in Finland, found in stormblast0891’s YouTube channel.
Rob Hubbard’s Wikipedia page. Somebody should edit it with additional information!
An interview from 1997 with Rob who was still at Electronic Arts back then.
Not the Rob Hubbard you’re looking for.
An awesome amount of remixes of Rob’s tunes at remix.kwed.org.
Too lazy for browsing the High-Voltage SID Collection? Here are almost all of Rob Hubbard’s SID tunes.
The starting point for your own research.

If you like it then feel free to click the Flattr button on this site, follow the BleepCast on Twitter and/or drop me a comment. Thanks!

BleepCast by Phil Strahl is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

BleepCast – Level 5

Phil Strahl — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 13:00:20 +0000

The BleepCast inspects covers, remixes and de-makes of our favorite tunes in the last 30 years in this level and asks how everything started, how it evolved and where it all went. This is a broad topic and so there’s no screwing around: This BleepCast hits you massively with 50 minutes of pure nerdsound, spoken and played alike. And the best of all: You’ll love it! I’m happy, Bob!

Level Information:

This level occupies 50 MB in your memory and has a time limit of 55:27 min.
This podcast is EXPLICIT because occasionally the dreaded F-word escaped my mouth. It’s a ~~fuckin~~ habit — I’m sorry

If you like it then feel free to click the Flattr button on this site and/or drop me a comment. Thanks!

BleepCast by Phil Strahl is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

BleepCast – Level 4

Phil Strahl — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:00:10 +0000

This is a rather personal episode of the BleepCast and deals with the first games I had been playing when I was a little kid and how my love for chipmusic eventually evolved over the years. I take you back to the 1980′s once again: You know the time, but most of you won’t know the place: My brain. Enjoy music from the C64, early PCs and some ramblings from my youth. If you don’t like it… then you’re a poo-poo-head!

Level Information:

This level occupies almost 24 MB in your memory and has a time limit of 26:16 min.
This podcast is EXPLICIT because occasionally the dreaded F-word escaped my mouth once again.

The 1541 Floppy Drive. Easy to think inside the box- Because it’s so huge and heavy.
The Great Giana Sisters for the C64. Total Super Mario Bros. ripoff. Nintendo won lawsuit against the programmers. Now legendary.
The Competition Pro joystick. Mean Red & Black Gaming machine. Durability +5. Discard after playing “Summer Games” or “Winter Games”.
GORILLAS.BAS is also on the Wikipedia, by the way. I still haven’t checked out the source code.
Sokoban. Behold out the eye-cancerous CGA presentation.
The Secret of Monkey Island, the good old one. With good old Reggae influenced music.

If you like it then feel free to click the Flattr button on this site, follow the BleepCast on Twitter and/or drop me a comment. Thanks!

BleepCast by Phil Strahl is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

BleepCast – Level 3

Phil Strahl — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 13:01:58 +0000

This all new episode of the BleepCast deals with gamifications of great movie scores. If you were already alive in the 80′s, going to the movies or just watching classic flicks from the 80′s on your VCR you probably had once the urge to become Indiana Jones, Marty McFly or Luke Skywalker yourself. Then you just had to go out (yes, I know, that’s the hardest part in the life of a nerd) and get yourself one of the games that had licensed movie content among them, and usually some crappy game as well. Although sometimes you would be surprised by actually real good games…

Level Information:

This level occupies almost 40 MB in your memory and has a time limit of 43:29 min.
This podcast is EXPLICIT because occasionally the dreaded F-word escaped my mouth once again.

If you like it then feel free to click the Flattr button on this site, follow the BleepCast on Twitter and/or drop me a comment. Thanks!

BleepCast by Phil Strahl is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.