Old Audio Part 2: Some Lesser Home Computers

The previous article, 'Part1: You People Don't Know You're Even Born' is available here.

A frustrated beginning

If only I'd learned to program properly when I was younger. I started pretty young, with my first professional game work happening when I'd just turned 16, but if I could have actually programmed the playroutine as well as writing the music I wouldn't have had to contend with the myriad of software and systems by different programmers and companies. I could have worked more quickly and probably earned more money until CD-Audio became the standard. It would have made my job at Psygnosis easier early on if I could have just spent a few weeks writing a player for whichever platform I had to use. It happened to some extent, but I wasn't yet a good enough programmer to do more complex stuff.

In 1990, when I had just turned 16, I got a phone call asking me if I wanted to do the music on Last Ninja 2 on the Amiga. Now then, when I read other pieces about how other people got started in whatever they do, there's always very important stuff missing. Like when you read interviews with someone and they casually drop in "...and then I was signed by Sony". Woh there! Hold on a minute! How exactly did that happen? Telepathy? Did a Sony A&R walk past you in the street, smell that you could write music and then immediately pop a contract from his suit pocket? I always want to know how it got to that point. So for what happened in my case, you'll have to read Part 3, but for now, continue on...

It Begins

So...In 1990, when I had just turned 16, I got a phone call asking me if I wanted to do the music on Last Ninja 2 on the Amiga. Obviously I did want to because I'm not insane and thanks to the timing, the half-term holiday was coming up at school. For the week of that holiday, I went to the office of Consult Software in Birkenhead, sat there with a tape recording of the C64 music and converted it to the Amiga with Noisetracker. I got £40 per tune, which is the equivalent of around £90 today. They got a bargain, but 7 tunes equalled an amount of money I'd never comprehended owning before. It was brilliant. I splashed out on a joystick just because I had the money. I've still got it and it still works like new. :)


Anyway, more on the Amiga later. While I was there, Consult Software were also doing some other game conversions and it was on one of them that I got to do my only ZX Spectrum (known as the Timex Sinclair in the USA) music, for Donald's Alphabet Chase. Going from the interface that I can remember, and doing a search, I'm pretty sure that the software I used was "Wham! The Music Box". it was taglined 'The Complete Sound System For Your Spectrum', but I think they must have got confused about the meaning of the word "complete". It had two notes of polyphony, which was actualy mildly impressive for the spectrum when it was released in 1985. Notes had to be entered into a stave, but it was basically a step-time sequencer (like a horizontal Tracker) because every note was a quaver. If you wanted longer notes, you just put multiple consecutive quavers of the same note. With it I made an absolutely shocking version of the Alphabet Song in about 15 minutes. I also did a rubbish Amiga version and the Amiga sound effects as well, which led me onto doing...

You've got an ST? State!

The Atari ST was £100 cheaper than the Amiga because it was £100 less impressive. The soundchip was the AY-3-8910, an utterly dreadful excuse for a synthesizer with three square waves and a noise channel. It's a shame really because the ST was supposed to have the AMY chip, which would have had 8 channels with additive synthesis (but no sample playback), but it got cut for cost and timing reasons. I wasn't thrilled with the idea of doing Atari ST music but it was only music for the title screen. There was a music package for the ST called Quartet, which allowed playback of 4 sample channels, basically giving it the same capability as the Amiga at the expense of almost the entire CPU. As I'd already done the Amiga version of the game, I just ported it to Quartet using its not-a-tracker notation-based interface. Compared to using a tracker, it was a bit slow going and took about a day to do, but it ended up sounding identical and therefore exactly as poor as the Amiga version.

Bad as the ST was for sound, Atari made the bizarre decision to add MIDI ports, which gave it a life in music far beyond what would be expected. Cubase and Logic originated on the Atari ST and it garnered a large following for general music production.

And that was pretty much my entire output for anything that wasn't an Amiga in the 8 and 16-bit transitional era. You might notice that luckily enough, tools were available for what I needed to do. Sadly, I never got to do any music for my beloved Commodore 64. Because I couldn't yet program. Because I had clearly not yet learned how to stop being an idiot.

Still to come: Psygnosis stuff, Amiga, The FM Towns, SNES, a failed Megadrive attempt, Playstation, PC, N64, beepy mobile phones.

Next Up: Part 3: Amiga, career-maker