sid - the beginning

for many years, games have relied on music to add atmosphere. we all have our favourite musician/s, and i personally think it's important to have someone to look up to, at least you have some kind of a goal then.

generally, graphics tend to get all the glory in videogames. game music is either disregarded completely or dismissed as irrelevant; how can it compete with gouraud-shaded polygons and realtime rendering?

music is as essential part of any computer game. without music, the game appears dull and there's no dimension what so ever. the technological advances in the field of game music have been just as dramatic as those in the visual domain.

in the beginning there was the spectrum. the redoubtable 8bit machine simply had a speaker that you could turn on and off. when the commodore 64 first appeared, it was considered a great technical advance because it's specially designed sound interface device (sid). this magnificence gave the musician three synthesized waveform voices [channels] to work with. music was written either on a pc or straight into the machine ifself in source code, with the notes, their length and their volume typed in manually.

i know that many musicians regards the era when they had to drive the c64's three-voice chip as the golden age of computer-music. the music was rudimentary, but there was a real sense of challenge involved. writing the melody wasn't enough; you also had to write a sound driver routine to control the sid that would fit into the memory available - normally 3-5kb.

theoretically, you could only ever get three notes at a time on the sid, but ways were soon found to push the chip beyond that spec. one of the common tricks was to assign short, arpeggiated notes to one voice and trigger them for 1/30th of a second, thereby fooling the human ear into thinking it was hearing more than one note simultaneously. and there were many other techniques. sampled sound didn't really come into it's own until the development of the Amiga's four-voices, 8bit soundchip [though a handful of c64 games like martin galway's "arkanoid" actually managed to use it], so sampling chords/drums to save voice polyphony was, strictly speaking, out of bounds. what was possible, though, was realtime waveform shaping on the sid's square-wave voice or filling empty spaces between notes with echoes from other voices.


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the cream of sid-riders, the unbeatable and most spectacular ones, will and have written themselves into the history of computer music forever.


martin galway

one of the most talented music programmer of all times. he wrote various soundtracks for ocean/imagine games. already after a couple of years he had worked on more than 30 games, like "rambo", "hyper sports", "arkanoid", "green beret" and "miami vice".

he started to write computer music in 1984, when he still attended school in manchester. he wrote the music for a game a friend of him wrote on a bbc computer. this game was published by ocean, which were very impressed by his work, so they gave him a c64, a datasette, an assembler and said: "Let's see what your able to do...". that was in 1984, and in february of 1985 he signed a contract as a programmer at ocean.

"when i have an idea for a song, i enter every single note into the computer. this can take pretty long, if you consider a twelve minute song with three voices. to try musical ideas, i use a seiko ds202/ds310 and a yamaha cx5m synthesizer. our delelopment system at ocean is more than top secret, because it's the best! i will only tell that i enter the music on a c128d and play it on another c128d". this was his exact words to an interview from "happy computer" issue 11/86. mr. galway also said that : "rob hubbard is the only one i pay respect to. all other musicians are second class. that's because of their lack of programming skills or missing arrangement-experience." - which leads us to the other legend...


rob hubbard

mr. hubbard has specialized on computer music. some of his famous tunes are "commando", "monty on the run" and "thing on a spring". critics said that sometimes, his musics were better than the whole game. there was a real fan community which buught the games just because of his music. an english journalist once wrote: "it's unbelievable, how he makes the c64 sound like ten voices with only three!"

at the beginning of his musical career, he begged for about half a year at software companies before he got his three first jobs. that was the music for the legendary "action Biker" by mastertronic, gremlin graphic's "thing on a spring" and "confuzion" by incentive. mr. hubbard also worked for some other companies too, firebird, elite, system 3, martech and alligata.

[taken from an interview by happy computer, issue 7/86.] "it's hard to tell which of my tunes are the best. i'm proud of all my musics, but my favourites are "master of magic", "crazy comets", "gerry the germ", "spellbound" and "kentilla". my *absolute* favourites are "monty on the run" and "zoids".

it seems that hubbard equals galway when he stated that he "likes the music of martin galway of ocean, thinking of his musics from "rambo" and "comic bakery".


ben daglish

daglish didn't "hit" the people with his music until about a year after his first music pieces on the c64. But it didn't take long before he stood responsible for doing some of the most original [and best] tunes ever on the c64. i refer to "the last ninja" by system 3, "bombo" by rino marketing, "biggles" by mirrorsoft and "firelord" by hewson. all these tunes were made during 86-87. he has an unique ability to perfectly mix sounds [of his very own style] of the smoothest and particular way, creating some of the best music pieces i have ever heard.

ben began his musical career in the time-honoured tradition: recorder lessons at an early age. his parents were keen music fans, and counted running a folk club amongst their musical interest. ben was going to study music seriously, but decided to do maths and physics instead to gain a place at university. within a year, he decided that university wasn't really what he was cut out for, and decided to return to sheffield.


tim follin

tim follin has carved himself an eviable position in the videogame industry. an accomplished player of the guitar, piano and violin, his career started with freelance work in the mid-'80s. this was followed by a job with software creations, which then occupied a cramped office above a computer shop in central manchester.

at the time, the company was porting a range of capcom-coin-ops to home computer formats. tim created a range of truly outstanding soundtracks for its conversions of games such as "bionic commando", "led storm" and "ghouls'n'ghosts" [argubably his finest hour, putting capcom's snes tunes to shame] for computers including the spectrum, c64, and later on, the amiga.

tim stayed with software creations until about 4 years ago, having composed and programmed acclaimed soundtracks for "solstice", "target renegade" (nes), "spider-man and the x-men", "equinox" and "plok!" [snes] he later found time to create a range of widely regarded rock tunes for Interplay's "rock'n'roll racing", also on the snes.


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below you can download the c64-tunes of the 4 pioneers mentioned above!
you'll need winrar or winzip to unpack these files. if you do not have
a player for these tunes, check out the best there is, sidplay!

martin galway
rob hubbard
ben daglish
tim follin

finally, i hope you have enjoyed reading about these guys. my personal attachment to these maestros' work are of tremendously importance. in fact, i don't think i would've been doing music the way i am today, if it wasn't for these guys. thank you!