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day of the dalek (45994)
Journal of day of the dalek (45994)
Anyone else remember the classic Commodore 64 crack intros, which often had some really good music to go along with them?
I remember really liking one of the earlier ATC intros, which used a song called Scumball that was composed for a game of the same name by Tim Follin.
Eagle Soft Incorporated seemed like they cracked a huge amount of games and used various intros, but this song was one I particularly liked. It's called R1D1 and was composed by Antony Crowther. The tempo is slower in the first video because that's on an emulated PAL C64 whereas the other is an NTSC C64. I remember it from Superstar Ice Hockey, which was also cracked by ESI.
More generally, the C64 just had a lot of games with music that sounded really good on the three voices of its SID chip.
Winter Games by Epyx was one of the early Olympics video games and included many national anthems and different music for each of the events. It has a really good version of Bugler's Dream for the opening ceremony. Yes, the actual Bugler's Dream, not just the beginning of Bugler's Dream followed by a fanfare written by John Williams appended in place of the remainder of the song. I also really liked the music for the freestyle skating, ski jump, and speed skating events, though the video only has the full song for freestyle skating.
Out Run was an arcade game ported to the C64 and other systems. In my opinion, the C64 versions of Splash Wave and Magical Sound Shower sound as good or better than their original arcade versions.
Gemstone Warrior opted to use classical music, varying up the settings for the SID chip's three voices to create at least one, two, three, and four versions of a single song. This video with a version of the song played on a PAL C64 cites the composer as unknown. Blasphemy! It's J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, Prelude 6 in D Minor.
I really enjoyed Final Assault, which was an Epyx mountaineering game set in the French Alps. The main title theme by Charles Callet was a great song. One of the songs used during actual gameplay if you packed headphones or slept in a bivouac was also really good. The gameplay was actually quite repetitive, but I still enjoyed this game if nothing else because of the music. Some ports of this game used different songs, but the Commodore Amiga used versions of these same songs. The main title theme sounds great on the Amiga, though with the advantage considerably more powerful sound capabilities than the C64.
Some games used less than three voices for music because some were reserved for sound effects in the game. Although Stardust in Lazy Jones doesn't have the same sound quality as much of the other music I've linked to, it's also not using all three voices for the song. This was, of course, plagiarized by Zombie Nation in Kernkraft 400.
Oh, there's one more game I have to mention. I don't particularly like the version of the Sylvester McCoy-era Doctor Who theme used in the C64 version of Dalek Attack. Some parts sound pretty good, but the middle eight portion of the theme just doesn't sound like it has the correct melody. There was also an Amiga version of Dalek Attack which had a more accurate version of the theme, plus the Daleks actually said EXTERMINATE in the game. Of course, that wasn't feasible when you have three voices to work with and need some of them for sound effects.
I'm sure I've forgotten or overlooked a lot of other really good music from this era, so what are some other really good crack intros and songs from the C64?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 19 2024, @05:31PM
Shame on you!
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday October 19 2024, @06:11PM (6 children)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rz1vbt3zHUU [youtube.com]
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(Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday October 19 2024, @06:32PM (5 children)
Today, I could perhaps play that game for 15 minutes of so , but after that period either boredom at the 'plot' would occur, or I would go mad at the repetitive 'music'. Yet I recall occasionally playing similar games for much longer than 15 minutes perhaps 30 years ago.
I wonder what the current gamers will think of their high-powered, GPU. graphics of today in 30 years time?
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday October 19 2024, @08:33PM
Yeah even relative for the period it was simplistic due to being a film game adaption and only meant to be finished in about 15min: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdMMAkfBnYo [youtube.com]
A modern game with similar mechanics that might be able to stick your ass to the seat for a while is Cuphead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF9tzn7UUIo [youtube.com]
Kids are growing up on Minecraft and Roblox graphics that was considered near obsolete even by the early 2000s and I've just recently seen friends' kids with a Switch playing the original Super Mario via an emulator and their parents didn't even know what Mario was when I asked so they pretty conditioned to minimalist graphics growing up. As for teen gamers, well, I'm not up to date to be honest but I believe just 5 years ago you had a lot of really popular pixel art games like Dead Cells, Terraria, Starbound and Noita so I think that many of the current titles will still be played for decades to come.
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(Score: 1) by day of the dalek on Saturday October 19 2024, @11:57PM (1 child)
To some extent, the repetitive music is due to the limitations of the hardware, where everything including the memory-mapped I/O for the hardware like the display has to fit within 64K of RAM. Programmers of that era were great at pushing the hardware to its limits, but there's still only so much you can do with a 1 MHz 6510 CPU and less than 56K left over after the memory-mapped I/O for the level's assets and the actual program. The gameplay for that video looks fairly similar to Dalek Attack, though noticeably more simplistic. The Amiga version of Dalek Attack shows one way to make the music a bit less repetitive, where the different levels (London, Paris, New York, Tokyo, and of course Skaro) have different music. A bit of a longer track, if it can be, say, three minutes long instead of looping every minute or so like Scumball, might make it feel a bit less repetitive. It would just mean longer delays between levels to load in the data from the notoriously slow 1541 drives, but it might help to give each level a different feel and make it not quite as annoying. It also helps if the levels are fairly to get through, so the track only music doesn't loop so many times.
Even in the 90s, games like Doom had a single track for each level and would repeat it, but the music was varied somewhat between levels. For example, a couple of levels in Doom II used The Demon's Dead [youtube.com], which has a very creepy sound and kind of has a feel of impending doom (no pun intended) to it. It's a great song, but it would have been obnoxious if that was used for all 30 levels of Doom II. The VGA systems of that era still took up some of the address space for memory-mapped I/O. Mode 13h on the VGA was 320x200 with 256 colors, taking up ~64K of RAM starting at A000:0000, if I remember correctly. A lot of games also used Mode X, which was 320x240 with 256 colors, but I don't remember the details of how this actually worked. The difference is that these video modes still left a lot more memory available for other stuff like sprites, textures, music, and the actual program.
There were a fairly wide range of games for the C64, and not everything was so repetitive. For example, the original SimCity [youtube.com] was first released on the C64, though it had a few less features than on other systems of that era. Starflight [youtube.com] was a pretty complex game and still worked on the C64. Its sequel, Starflight II, probably could have worked on the C64, too, but by that time, the C64 was quite an old system and probably wasn't worth the effort to create a port of the game.
A lot of games from the 90s seemed to have very detailed levels that could be explored in a non-linear fashion. There were a lot of secrets in the levels for Doom, Doom II, Duke Nukem 3D, and a lot of first person shooters of the day. If you just wanted to clear a lot of the monsters and get through the levels quickly, you could certainly do so. But the also offered a lot of opportunities for exploration. On the other hand, Duke Nukem Forever was panned when it finally got released for its extremely linear gameplay. Games that are non-linear and allow the player to explore will hold up much better. Modern games like American Truck Simulator [fandom.com] and theHunger: Call of the Wild [fandom.com] will probably still be viewed favorably in the future because of their graphics and also the many opportunities to explore and not play in a linear fashion. Games that have more simplistic and linear gameplay will probably seem dull to future audiences. I have no idea how much graphics will advance over 35 years, but I think the retro graphics of Starflight from 1989 don't hinder it from being a fun game to this day because of the intriguing plot and all of the opportunities to explore.
Off-topic, but I sent you an email about 12 hours ago. I know that you haven't always received my emails, so I am mentioning this in my comment to try to make sure that you did receive this one.
🐈 ➡ 😸 ➡ :)
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday October 21 2024, @06:09PM
Traffic Department 2192 has a rather interesting storyline. While a bit on the stale / repetitive / kinda poor game play side of things, it's an interesting story. It was released as Freeware in 2007 according to Wikipedia. Worth a shot even in this day and age of "flashy graphic good".
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Tuesday October 22 2024, @05:59AM
The C-64 version of the Neuromancer game from Interplay had a digitised version of Devo's "Some Things Never Change" during the intro screen. It's no big deal to have digitised music today, but the hardware this used makes the effort notable. They hacked the C-64's SID chip into a DAC and they needed to fit about 15 seconds or so of the song onto a 170 kilobyte Commodore 1541 floppy disk. Was not terribly high quality but the song was clearly recognisable. It was an impressive feat given the hardware limitations.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.