15 years of Commodore 64 music: Scene Spirit #Commodore64 #C64 #Chiptunes
What Linus Åkesson can do with a Commodore 64 to make sound and music is truly outstanding. He’s been in a number of demoscene competitions over the years. Now Linus has released a C64 musicdisk containing 18 SID tunes and simultaneously released as an album on Spotify and other streaming services.
Making an album was a surprisingly enjoyable experience. Besides picking a good set of songs and fretting over the best order in which to play them, it involved adjusting the master volume of each track and the length of the gaps between them. The volume adjustment was achieved by patching the playroutines in all the places where the global volume register is written, and storing the value into RAM instead. After the playroutine returns, the value is retrieved, adjusted, and written to the register.
To play this musicdisk on real hardware, you need a PAL C64 with a model 8580 SID chip.
But for your convenience I’ve already made a recording from such a machine, and applied some subtle mastering and stereo-widening. The result has been uploaded to YouTube (above) and various streaming services including Spotify, Apple Music, and iTunes.
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