Commodore Remix

Name of Mod and author?

Not a great tune I'd say, but it's a nostalgia thing for me. I first heard it way back in 1992, it was part of a 1991 Acorn Archimedes demo called !Bodgering (odd name, to be sure), so it goes back to 1991 or earlier.

The tune is almost certainly an Amiga Mod, but it's kind of locked up iniside the demo executable. Don't know how to extract it.

Excerpt (it's a very short tune):

http://www.proggies.uk/audio/bodgeringd ... pt_mp3.mp3 (756 Kb)


Thanks.

David.
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Pulled this from an ascii dump of the archi binary of !Bodger..

 áMUSX8B TINF  &MVOX STER MNAM daisy chain ANAM Converted from Amiga MLEN

The only mod on the Amiga listed as "Daisy chain" is by a composer called Piranha..

http://janeway.exotica.org.uk/release.php?id=2774

Cant seem to find a download link for the mod to check though.. Its as far as I got..

Thanks Andy! That could very well be the one, but as yet I've had no luck in downloading the Mod. Will keep looking.

David.
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You can download daisy chain from here but I dont think its the right tune.
http://janeway.exotica.org.uk/release.php?id=43107

Someone remade the demo in basic but I think used a different music and credited as
The music is a 1993, 4-channel Amiga tune by Jogeir Liljedahl, which was itself a cover version of a C64 tune by Jochen Hippel.

Analog-X64 wrote:You can download daisy chain from here but I dont think its the right tune.
http://janeway.exotica.org.uk/release.php?id=43107

The tune I'd like to identify is probably the one by Piranha, as suggested by AndyUK.

Analog-X64 wrote:Someone remade the demo in basic but I think used a different music

Um... that 'someone' was me.

The original 1991 version was written in ARM assembly language by ArcEmpire; my remake (made in Oct 2013) was written in ARM BBC BASIC 5, and I think - or rather hope - it runs at 50 fps on a 25 MHz ARM 3 processor (I don't know for certain because I wrote it on an emulator (Arculator) which I know executes code too quickly). I didn't have the Mod (although I could probably now rip it from the original demo after all), so I borrowed one of my all-time fave Amiga tunes - Jogeir's "Nearly there". It's just occurred to me that I could've remade 'daisy chain' myself (perhaps using MilkyTracker), but I doubt it'd sound as good as the original.


David.
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BasicCoder wrote: Um... that 'someone' was me.

The original 1991 version was written in ARM assembly language by ArcEmpire; my remake (made in Oct 2013) was written in ARM BBC BASIC 5, and I think - or rather hope - it runs at 50 fps on a 25 MHz ARM 3 processor (I don't know for certain because I wrote it on an emulator (Arculator) which I know executes code too quickly). I didn't have the Mod (although I could probably now rip it from the original demo after all), so I borrowed one of my all-time fave Amiga tunes - Jogeir's "Nearly there". It's just occurred to me that I could've remade 'daisy chain' myself (perhaps using MilkyTracker), but I doubt it'd sound as good as the original.


David.
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Its a small world

Another possibility, is to look at what year the demo was made and look at amiga modules made that year or something.

Do you have a link to the original demo? I could have a look at it via Hex editor and see if I can find anything.

Hmm I grabbed the ArcEmpire one and hex edited that header in my last post out of the original risc file. The hex dump of the risc file I mentioned says its "Converted from amiga mod", and uses these samples:

Instrument set of the tune ( after a hex/ascii search is ) :

ST-08:Choir37
ST-08:choir47
ST-08:Hallbrass3
ST-09:dreampad1
ST-09:symphonic1
ST-09:Panflute5
ST-09:superbass1
ST10:Hallsnare3
St-08:choir1
ST-10:hallstick1
ST-09:universe1
ST-10:kick3

and this matches the one Analog posted the link to?

So, we have an amiga mod, with the same name as the one in the original Risc file, with the same Sample set as the one in the risc .exe file that sounds nothing like the one your remember. Even when loaded into Milky tracker, the samples sound nothing like your mp3 excerpt. So the demo either had 2 parts? OR its not the tune you remember? HMMm now that's a puzzle?

So, a popular tracker at the time was Coconizer on the Archie. Doing a search for Coconizer AND daisy turned up this page. ftp://arcade.demon.co.uk/flist.txt with a mention of THIS file :

028246 -daisychai 149256 "daisy chain" - 205k - 37 patterns - 8.5/10

Maybe the guy who wrote the module, loaded the converted Amiga mod into Coco, cleared song data leaving samples intact and rewrote his own tune. Just clicking save as he went. So, same save name, same sample set, different tune.( of course if it IS this version )

Oh and for the record, there's a mod in Risc 'Symphony' format called "daisy chain" too, though I can load that into XMplay and its not the same tune either.. Heck man, how many Daisy chains are there!! hehe

UPDATE : Found a link for the -daisychai mod, loaded it into XMplay and its not that one either.. So now I'm REALLY stumped..

EMULATION TIME!!!

Some excellent sleuthing there, Andy! I loaded the file/code into a hex editor and noticed that the text is reversed? As in "agimA", etc. Was that the case at your end? Here's a link to the version that I have:

Complete zip/archive:
http://www.proggies.uk/riscos/temp/Bodgering

Just the 'executable'/Absolute file (file type &FF8) which contains the tune:
http://www.proggies.uk/riscos/temp/RunImage

Perhaps I'll drop the author (a Norwegian chap named Tor Houghton [Badger/ArcEmpire]) an e-mail? Erm.. no, perhaps not. He might consider it extremely weird (it is now, after all, 25 years down the line).

Incidentally, the converted version of the tune used in that demo will probably sound quite different to the original, unmolested Amiga version because back in those early days, no Archimedes music players could properly handle (if at all) most of the Amiga effect commands - vibrato, tremelo, volume fades, etc., which ruined so many great Amiga tunes (Walkman's famous 'Klisje Paa Klisje' was used in another (pretty excellent) ArcEmpire demo called 'Transmortal', and it sounded absolutely aweful because the music player routine couldn't get the pitch slides right). 99% of Archimedes demos used ripped Amiga tunes because hardly anyone in the Acorn demoscene could make decent music. The best musicians were always Amiga users!

David.
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Ok found it

The mod is called "Searching" by Peter Salomonsen made in may 1991
Download it here: http://modarchive.org/index.php?request ... ery=116373

I used a hex editor on the RunImage file you provided and found the name of the song and authors name.

I suspect the RunImage file is compressed with some kind of crunching program? hence all the text is reversed.

Analog-X64... you're a star!

That is indeed it. Many thanks to you (and also to AndyUK who expended time & energy trying to help me out).

The original Amiga tune, when played through XMPlay, sounds much nicer than the converted and deformed Archimedes version. Think what I'll do now is get back into Arculator and replace the Jogeir tune (as great as it is) with 'Searching' (technically I should ask for permission really, shouldn't I).

I also feel inclined to check out some of Peter Salomonsen's other work.

Thanks again.


David.
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You're welcome David.

Sadly these days, I dont get to play with hex editor's much, so when the opportunity comes, I love doing it.

It is fun and brings back memory's of the C64 and Amiga days where I spent many hours look at how programs worked.

I'm sure AndyUK would agree as well

Hey good job Analog!!!!!!! Didnt get back to look through those files you posted.. Looking through now yes, its really not the song I suggested..

Though the !bodgering archive I grabbed from the Icebird official site doesn't contain either of those files, but a directory containing 8 files and a data folder???

THATS the one I searched through and found the songdata in a hex dump I posted earlier from a file called "ObjectCode"?

Did they produce more than one?? This one is from 1991, made by ArcEmpire.. !

From THIS page :http://icebird.org/classics.html

with this link .. Bodgering ArcEmpire 1991/10 ARC 192k

giving you this file :http://icebird.org/filez/demos/ArcEmpire/ARM-Power.zip

You think they made a mistake with the archive??

I looked through the ObjectCode and looking at the module, its definitely converted to a different format that the tracker player it comes with can playback. I dont have an Acorn emulator so I cant verify what the track sounds like.

The tracker player is credited to " Tracker Modules Player V2.08 Written by Fabrice MERCIER (c) 1991 THE SERIAL PORT" found in the "trk_player" file header

Its possible the archive is a mistake.

Do the samples in the mod you found match the ones in that object code file I posted earlier? If not then must be an incorrect archive. That's that one solved too.. Bloody annoying that I was searching through wrong demo though heh heh

Ahh well, we got there in the end, that's all that matters. So the plan is to remake the demo with the correct tune?

AndyUK wrote:Ahh well, we got there in the end, that's all that matters. So the plan is to remake the demo with the correct tune?

I'm not sure I had planned to, but I have now replaced the JL mod with the recently rediscovered one and uploaded it to my website: http://www.proggies.uk

(It doesn't work properly on the Raspberry Pi though because the demo uses a 16-colour screen mode which the current R-Pi version of RISC OS isn't fully equipped for.)

The original Bodgering demo appears to be a very simple knock-it-up quick effort written in assembly language, which I think was just an advert for more substantial ArcEmpire demos (like 'Transmortal', which was impressive). So, the original demo ran at 50 fps on an 8MHz ARM2 processor (as anyone would expect since there's not that much actually going on in the demo); I wanted to see if I could remake it in BBC BASIC and have it running at 50 fps on a 25MHz ARM3 with its 4Kb cache (I suspect it only runs at 10 to 15 fps on the cacheless ARM2).

FWIW, I'll be converting the demo to 256 colours so that it does work on the Raspberry Pi, but, obviously, it hardly shows off anything -- not even BBC BASIC!

Finally... I've always wanted to do a BBC BASIC remake of Kefrens' excellent "Desert Dream" -- it's certainly possible to do a faithful remake on a fast ARM-based machine like the Raspberry Pi using only BBC BASIC and RISC OS graphics functions (non-hardware-accelerated). I think the C64 remake of that demo is absolutely stunning, and seems quite impossible in places!

So much fun to be had, but so little time...

David.
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