[HN Gopher] Martin Galway's music source files from 1980's Commo...
___________________________________________________________________
Martin Galway's music source files from 1980's Commodore 64 games
Author : ingve
Score : 170 points
Date : 2026-04-25 10:46 UTC (18 hours ago)
HTML web link (github.com)
TEXT w3m dump (github.com)
| MrScruff wrote:
| Super cool. I loved Galways's C64 tunes as a kid, especially
| Wizball & Parallax. I remember trying to write my own player in
| assembly (yet another unfinished project).
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| They were absolutely wonderful. And not just those by Galway of
| course. During Covid by a weird bad luck I got stuck for 2.5
| months way from my wife and kid, in another country. But by
| chance I was, alone, in the house where I grew up. I dug my old
| C128 (which I only ever used in C64 mode) from the attic,
| watched Youtube vid, cleaned it, cleaned and lightly oiled (!)
| the disk drive and tried my old disks...
|
| The game _Commando_ was still loading and I 'd let it run for
| hours on the intro screen (music by Rob Hubbard) while I'd do
| other things.
|
| > I remember trying to write my own player in assembly (yet
| another unfinished project).
|
| Never wrote a SID tune nor a mod-player but my neighbors did:
| they wrote an Amiga mod player for... The Atari ST. It could
| play the four channels. Of course the quality wasn't the same
| and you were forced to waste CPU-cycles but it was working.
|
| Fun memories.
|
| Now as TFA: recently I took old DOS .ASM files of mine and
| basically told Sonnet 4.6: _" Make them compile again"_ and
| discovered the world of UASM etc. and eventually we made it to
| compile.
|
| Seeing those C64 assembly files: I haven't tried it yet but I
| take I could do the same? Just ask whatever LLM to find me a
| way to compile and tell me how to play these in an emulator?
|
| Anyone knows where to start / what's the TDLR to compile these
| C64 files?
|
| For example for old DOS .ASM files the TDLR; is _" Compile them
| using the free UASM assembly, run the result in DOSBox"_.
| ncr100 wrote:
| Q: have people attempted to translate this into Tidal Cycles, or
| Strudel JS? (Pattern playing of music by notation)
|
| Edit: AI says doing the translation would be hard, though doable.
| https://claude.ai/share/65c16d60-5d27-496b-96a7-40959e95ac62
|
| Edit 2: here is an AI translation of some of the notes, what
| Claude claims as the main melody:
|
| https://strudel.cc/#Ci8vIFdpemJhbGwgIklucHV0IE5hbWUiIC0gbWFp...
| .. uh ...
|
| Edit 3: the original theme is amazing and worth listening to
| https://youtu.be/sFYzjU-C3mA
| talideon wrote:
| That sounds nothing like any of the Wizball or Game Over
| tracks, I'm afraid.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Thanks for that. The Laboratory Background riff sounds a lot
| like versalife[0]
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF09vGckSAc&list=PLKkxnB
| wFOJ...
| cpldcpu wrote:
| I had to give it a try.
|
| Claude, the ole cheater, recognized what the file was,
| downloaded the psid from the web, found a wasm sid player and
| built a website around it:
|
| https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/df6cdcae-08dc-452b-ba19-f...
|
| https://claude.ai/share/4dd36c16-bc62-445a-b423-ad4637f06432
|
| GPT-5.5 built a lot of python scripts to extract the music
| data. Strudel implementation failed, but I then asked it to
| build a website:
|
| https://ubiquitous-vacherin-8e7993.netlify.app/
|
| This is a translation of the music into javascript based on the
| assembler source.
|
| Really impressive on both accounts. Some iterations were
| requied for both.
| Luc wrote:
| In the file
| https://github.com/MartinGalway/C64_music/blob/main/ocean_as...
|
| > DSP
|
| > not entirely sure what this one is... another variation of
| "Define Space" ? check back for the correct definition of this
|
| It's probably 'displacement'. This worked together with ORG
| ('origin'). ORG specifies where in memory the code will run. DSP
| then moves the code the specified amount further along in memory,
| with the understanding that it will be moved back to the ORG
| address when it needs to run.
|
| > DFC
|
| > not entirely sure what this one is... define characters?
|
| Same as DFM, but generates PETSCII instead of ASCII.
| erwincoumans wrote:
| Green Beret and Rambo: First Blood Part 2 tunes are still
| amazing, Martin is a wizard.
| photon-torpedo wrote:
| You can listen to the Wizball tunes here:
|
| https://deepsid.chordian.net/?file=/MUSICIANS/G/Galway_Marti...
|
| (use the little up/down arrows to switch between subtunes)
| wigster wrote:
| nice. i have fond memories of playing this with my dad about
| thirty five years ago
| hoc wrote:
| Nice. I loved his Short Circuit tune back then and looked at
| its code with my cartridge's monitor to extract it into a
| standlone player shell of mine (which might actually have
| worked out). Great to see the sources for the addresses and
| their meaning that one had to make guesses about 40 years
| ago...
|
| Also in the linked player under Short_circuit.sid , btw.
| Thanks!
| dwd wrote:
| This is really cool. Need to go grab my Reference Guide to make
| more sense of it, as it's been a while.
| nurettin wrote:
| I've been listening this on and off for more than a decade:
|
| https://slayradio.org
| ergonaught wrote:
| Memories! I loved Galway and Hubbard (and tigers and bears oh my
| etc). They managed to do some really interesting things under the
| constraints. Still love listening to some of it, today.
| _sys49152 wrote:
| hubbard was the only big name i grew up with but also played
| the shit out of arkanoid growing up.
| the_data_nerd wrote:
| the hard part isn't the notes. it's the per-frame register pokes.
| galway and hubbard did things like sweeping filter cutoff every
| frame, gating ring mod between voices, retriggering ADSR mid-
| note. SID drivers are basically tiny tracker engines running 50hz
| interrupts on the c64. the .sid format captures the 6510 driver
| code but stripping that into pattern notation throws away the
| actual sound. you can transcribe wizball's melody to strudel and
| it'll be recognizable. it won't sound like galway. the sound IS
| the register schedule, not the notes on top of it.
| steve_taylor wrote:
| Taking a brief look at wizball.asm, it actually used 200 Hz
| interrupts on both PAL and NTSC. The timings are shown from
| line 39.
| layer8 wrote:
| Presumably the music wasn't developed in form of these source
| files, given that they exceed the size of C64 RAM.
| talideon wrote:
| I'm not sure about Ocean, but a lot of companies used the
| Tatung Einstein, itself a 64KiB machine, as a development
| platform. I would assume that the software used for building
| this stuff was able to deal with source files larger than the
| machine can hold. They might've moved onto the likes of Atari
| STs, IBM-compatibles, and Amigas by the time Wizball was
| released though.
|
| Plenty of music was developed in the form of source files.
| flopsamjetsam wrote:
| > Plenty of music was developed in the form of source files.
|
| That's fascinating. I came in during the Amiga era, and
| everything was SoundTracker etc. files. I had no idea that
| music was hand-coded like this.
| crq-yml wrote:
| Some of the sound drivers would be paired with a machine
| code monitor, and therefore you could interactively develop
| by modifying hex bytes, which when you think about it, is
| basically the prototype for a tracker workflow.
|
| There was definitely a tendency to do "compose on the
| piano, then arrange" with a lot of the early chiptune
| workflows though. With Galway's stuff there is more
| reliance on proceduralism to get those long evolving
| sequences, something which is actually easier to access
| when it's built from source files and you can define
| rhythms, chords, dynamics, modulation as forms of
| indirection.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| There's always another 80s computer I'd never heard of...
|
| The Tatung Einstein was released in 1984 in the UK, was kind
| of MSX-like architecturally, and used the same 3" (not 3.5")
| floppies as the Amstrad CPC.
|
| I'm curious what US-based C64 devs would have used. Probably
| not this machine?
| egypturnash wrote:
| From what I've read it was not at all uncommon to have a
| MS-DOS machine that assembled your code much faster and
| spat it into the c64 over a parallel link.
| Chaosvex wrote:
| Not old enough to have experienced that era of computing but I do
| know that Cosmic Bakery slaps.
| golem14 wrote:
| Props to Martin Galway to make this available to the public. I
| wish this were more common. I.e. writers could insist on a
| contractual shorter copyright period when negotiating with
| publishers.
|
| Then again, I don't know how much authors earn on books after 10,
| 20, 30 years. It probably varies, the JRR Tolkien estate and K.K
| Rowling probably see still very significant income streams. It
| could still be a good strategy for lesser known authors.
| ekianjo wrote:
| JRR Tolkien still makes money from copyright but sadly can't
| write books anymore. The whole absurdity of copyright law.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-04-26 05:01 UTC)