There was actually a PRG and a note file that went with this.... I don't have the PRG file at the moment, but I do have the note text for some reason. I was pretty messed up at the time, reading this again. But here it is for posterity.
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c) 2004, Jaymz Julian
Prefered platform: PAL 6581.
"Sonic Dreams" is dedicated to all who were in that group with me, but
especially the ones who were/are my friends. You know who you are.
The nucleus of this song was created while I was humming The Syndrom's "Summer
Break" in the shower, which I first heard in a demo by Iceman about six months
after I joined Warriors of the Wasteland. It was him, indirectly, who
inspired me to take up c64 coding again, by coming up with these well designed
and implemented parts, and then spoiling them with an unshaded 8 block plasma
:).
I heard some of the music I wrote in 1996 and 1997 the other day. It was
horrifically bad. I think at this point it's safe to say that I didn't have
c64 hardware then, for a bunch of social reasons that seemed really important
at the time, but I didn't care, because I had the C64S emulator. C64S did
not emulate filters or ring modulation. I knew about filters, but I had never
actually used ring modulation at all back when I was in highschool writing
music in compute's sidplayer. I didn't understand how JCH handled filters,
though. Some of the songs weren't so bad musically, such as "Hit It!", and
"Not so JCH based", but the patches used were just so incredibly terrible,
and more importantly, unbalanced.
I think the only released song of mine from back then is "Happy Happy Joy Joy",
which isn't as terrible as all of the others. I'm thinking about re-doing
"Not So JCH Based" in TFX (titled because it used the same set of patches as
a worktune called "JCH Based", which became "More than one voice", which I
released a PC conversation of, but never the c64 version. I didn't understand
how to make sid patches in the JCH editor, so I just loaded up example songs,
and cleared the patterns, with no regard to which player version it was.
I also didn't understand how sid restart worked, but I did understand what
ADSR were, so I modified those. This was a bad idea, because on real
hardware, random notes would dissapear. Of course, that didn't save me
in 2002/2003 when I found out that my high pass filter was working completly
differently to everyone else's, so I was losing almost all of my percussion
on other people's c64's, but that's another story. A weaker high pass filter
is actually far more useful than the one commodore shipped, though.
I felt pretty bad when I got a real c64 again in 1998 (I was no longer sharing
a house, so I was no longer disallowed) on actual hardware. Thankfully, most
other people did recognise how bad it was, and it's all buried now, for the
most part. That was when I really found my feet on the sid. I guess I came
to be a commodore scener via a different route to most of you, whereas most
of you got c64's, saw crack intro's, got excited by demos, and became sceners,
that's not how it happened for me. I saw demos, and I was excited about them,
but I didn't see very many, because where I lived, in the middle of no-where,
none of my friends had c64's, they all had PC's.
Although I had a book on programming assembly, the osbourne one with the cartoon
robots, I never managed to get access to an assembler. So, I cut my assembly
programming teeth on the microbee computers at school, which were z80 based.
I actually wrote an 8 way scrolling game on those, which, while not the most
impressive feat ever, is interesting considering their complete lack of
reasonable video hardware.
It wasn't until a friend of mine sold me a PC for $200 (it was really a pity
deal - everyone was amazed by what I was doing on the microbee's, but no-one
appriciated the c64 that I had at home, and assured me that there were no
development tools woth having), with a copy of the microsoft assembler. I
was happy, and started spending all of my time trying to make the PC do what
I saw the c64 doing. And so I wrote a tile scrolling game, sand boarding 2000,
which I sadly no longer have anymore, and a music program callde "fuzz tracker",
which I sadly do have. It differed from most trackers, in that you had to enter
the frequency of the notes, you couldn't just type Q and get C-4. Other than
that, though, it's amazing how similar it looked to screem tracker 3, which
didn't come out until a number of years later, and which I instantly fell
deeply in love with.
Then, one day, someone showed me some PC demos. EGA Megademo by Spacepigs,
something by Cascada, and Amnesia by Rennasiance. The last of these is what
got me completly and totally hooked. I am not going to admit to which handles
I used for doing PC stuff, but I only used "A Life in Hell" for warez, where
I would crack my friend's original PC games for everyone else in the said
small town. Needless to say, even though when I was working at an ISP in
1995, we were spreading moving around a lot of warez data, and throwing my
cracks up onto the FTP's, I never really got anywhere in that scene, and
stopped following the demo side of it in early 1997, although I was writing
tracker music until late 2000, when the weirdest misadventure in my life
stopped me writing music almost completly, and from which the part of me
which writes non-c64 music never recovered, I guess (If you've ever listened
to "Evolution" by me, that's more a description of that time than anything
which writes non-c64 music never recovered, I guess (If you've ever listened
to "Evolution" by me, that's more a description of that time than anything
else).
I seem to have strayed somewhat from the point here. KnightCoder (later
Darkblood) from Sonic Dreams did not recognise how bad it was. And, so, I
fell into his group. I actually ended up working professionally with him,
once for 3 months in 1999, and and 9 months in 2002-2003. I met some great
people in that group, who all know who they are. I came onto IRC again a
while ago, to find some of the people who i'd lost contact with, as I
sit now in my little corner of the scene, but about a week later, I became
completly unable to connect to IRCnet again. I occasionally try and log
on, and even more occasionally succeed, but it seems almost impossible
to keep a connection if you're not blessed with a server in europe. One of
the people I live with now is talking about setting up ipv6 here, though, so
perhaps then I will be able to IRC regularly again.
To be fair, my falling out of contact is my own fault. If I had the dedication
that I used to have, I would have been on #c-64 for more than a collective two
weeks in the past four years. Once it became hard to connect to IRC, I
just gave up and emailed people instead. And then once I lost my email access
for six months, I never re-made the connections, for the most part. I wasn't
the same person I had been, so it didn't seem like the right thing to do.
It's a funny situation, that I find myself in. I just lost my job again, and
I hadn't had it long enough to pull myself out of debt from the last time I
was unemployed, so I can't afford regular internet access. But we hacked up
this arrangement with 802.11b wireless network cards and pineapple juice
cans across melbourne, for me to read email and use IM and IRC. It's all
very ghetto-chic, if only that was the effect I was aiming for.
o/~ What? Do I look like a fucking bank?
o/~ For my wardrobe, I've got the op shop to thank,
o/~ And just because poverty chic is back in fashion,
o/~ You think I'm loaded and you start harrassin'
But again, I stray from the point, which is that this song is dedicated to
the my old friends from Sonic Dreams. I love and miss all of you. It was
because of you guys that music moved from being "Something that I do
do" to "The primary thing that I do" back when it was. The time where it was,
was the best part of my life to date, and I wish I could recreate that, instead
of now where it has reverted past where it was, to "the thing that I used to
do".
In 7 days, I'll be 25 years old. I should have made something of myself by now.
-- Jaymz Julian, aka A Life in Hell/WoW/Unreal/Sonic Dreams, 20 march 2004.
jaymz@artificial-stupidity.net
(I still have the half finished "Titanic" demo on a disk. But I've lost the
music that I wrote for it :(. It was actually the second thing I composed
after my 9 month break from music in 1998-1999, when I realised that I was
never ever going to be able to even touch the ability of the people whom I
admire, or even be good enough to be respected as a musician by anyone,
and went into a deep depression for a month. I then drove myself into a
much, much deeper one by being stubborn and refusing to write any music, that
being the only thing that was keeping me sane up until that point. While not
the most stupid thing I've done in my life, it's in the top five.)
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