#CLUB SIDPLAY PORT DRIVER CODE#
#CLUB SIDPLAY PORT DRIVER FREE#

#CLUB SIDPLAY PORT DRIVER FREE#

Whenever a new sound was played it would check the current channels to see if any were free and if not only play if the priority of the new sound was higher than all of the currently playing ones. For my player I set priorities on each sound and roughly calculated the play position during playback. The player worked in the manner in which I thought was surely how everybody did it, but in my naivety I made something that was far more advanced.

I've read many reports of other people having the same sort of programming epiphany. I literally exclaimed, 'Oh!' and then it all suddenly made sense to me. That was until around the third day, when I was on the train and the metaphorical lightbulb switched on in my head.

#CLUB SIDPLAY PORT DRIVER CODE#

Although I'd had a go at messing with little example bits of assembler code written by Brian Postma, Amiga and assembler programming still never really sat right with me. I dug out a little 68000 assembler book that I'd got from somewhere and for the next two weeks, I sat on the train every morning with a pad working out the logic and writing assembler code. Being far too proud to say 'I don't know', I said that I'd sort out a player for them. I created them and sent them over only for them to ask 'How do we play them?'. There were no problems really, except for when they asked for the sound effects. I first did a title tune that was tense and rhythmical but they wanted something more ambient, so I did a bunch of variations on a sci-fi-sounding tune that I'd recently started on my brand new Korg O1/Wfd (took me two years to pay off). There were a bunch of sound effects and some music to do. It was never actually released, although a single-level demo did appear a long time after I'd finished working on it. It was an adventure game and sort-of sequel to the game Obitus. One of the earlier audio jobs that came along was Operation G2. As a result, although there was a large amount of game testing, I ended up doing all sorts of stuff: I designed levels for Hired Guns, got involved in design sessions for other games, drew the title screens for Lemmings on the Atari Lynx, evaluated new game submissions and, of course, did a whole bunch of audio. I started there in September 1992 and the next year was very productive for Psygnosis.

Day 2: The whole company (approximately 50 people) went go-karting.

Day 1: Got my own desk, brand new Amiga and monitor, phone, unreleased games to play.

I must have done 10 complete run-throughs from start to finish as the last bugs were fixed.īut this is how amazing and ridiculous my first days at Psygnosis were: For the final few release candidates, I was the only person who could play through the entire game in one go. Bill's Tomato Game wasn't released for another few months, so I ended up doing loads of testing on it. Soon after I'd finished everything, I got a full-time job at Psygnosis as a game evaluator a glorified tester really. The sample banks were refreshed on each level load because I used a technique in Protracker to get pulse-width-modulation that left the modulating sample corrupted. I managed to get the samples for the prehistoric levels down to only 5966 bytes. To keep the disk space down, I really cut down everything as much as I possibly could. Disks on the Amiga were 880KB and if I'd used 40KB for every tune, that would have taken more space than one whole disk.

One thing that is probably not realised these days is that it was not just RAM that was the problem. The music all had to be done in 3 channels so as to leave one channel free for sound effects and I had 40KB for samples. The total was 27 pieces of music, 10 stingers and some sound effects. There were 10 areas with 2 tunes-per-area and a title tune, high score tune etc. Although it was straight-forward because of Protracker, it was a lot of work. It had a very efficient synthesis technique and could produce very impressive sounding stuff in very little RAM, but Bill (the programmer) had trouble getting the binary playroutine to work (no source code was provided) so I went back to using Protracker. As usual, memory was highly restricted so I looked into using a music program I'd bought called Mugician. Before I joined Psygnosis as an employee, I did the music for Bill's Tomato Game on the Amiga.

Club sidplay port driver