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Results of the 3 compétitions held at the ReSeT#8 meeting in Coutances

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And the winners are :

  • graphic : Rexbeng
  • demo : Krusty, graphics by Grim, Beb, Ced and Voxfreak, music by Tom et Jerry, for Glory holes
  • music : Pulkomandy

All entries will be available later.



C64 SID on Amstrad CPC, software or hardware ?

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The Amstrad CPC use the General Instrument AY-3-8912 sound chip, providing 3 channels, each configurable to generate square waves, white noise or both. A small array of hardware volume envelopes are available. The C64 use the SID sound chip with also 3 channels, each configurable to generate 4 different waves forms : sawtooth, triangle, pulse, noise. It offers other features, much more than the AY-3-8912.

So is it possible to listen to SID music on an limited Amstrad CPC ? The answer is yes, and if you are lucky enough to read french, you will be able to read the article "les SID-Voices" on Quasar. So to resume, yes you can do it on a plain Amstrad CPC, but if you play 3 SID-Voices, you wont have enough CPU time to do something else. Otherwise on an Amstrad CPC+ using the DMA, you will be able to do something else than playing music. The Quasar article comes with the AY+ source to play SID-Voices on a CPC+. On a plain Amstrad CPC, you can use a program by Geco, a hungarian programmer. He usually works on the Elan enterprise, he wrote a SID player for this computer, and ported it to the Amstrad CPC. Download this Amstrad CPC SID player (128 Kb only).

Some informations about this utility directly from the author (taken from chipmusic.org) : I created the player used 6510 emulation code of Simon Owen, and CPC header checking. The player spends a lot of time with 6510 code, this is the reason of speed changing on CPC, on Enterprise I met less speed changing, may be the cause of this on EP the processor is running at 4Mhz if the code is not in the video Memory. Yes, only some feature is emulated, frequency registers, envelopes in 50Hz, control registers (without wave formats), and volume register, if I remember well. And the noise emulation is also interesting on CPC, because when noise should apply then I give fix 0f value to noise channel, and drive the frequency with tone channel frequency (set reg 6 tone and noise enable on a channel), with this solution 3 different noises can appear on the AY. The player can play songs in 2 speeds, 50Hz, and 100Hz, does not matter of SID speed, ex if the speed of SID is 60Hz the player plays it on 50Hz.

Finally, you can play it hard too, with an extension. Read about it on CPCWiki (a bit of drama included).



WYZTracker v0.5.0.6 by Augusto Ruiz, WYZPlayer and cpcwyzlib

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WYZTracker is a tool developed by Augusto Ruiz (interface in english and spanish), from Retroworks, that can be used to compose music for WYZPlayer.

WYZPlayer is a Z80 player for the AY-3-8910 sound chip (a 3-voice PSG : Programmable Sound Generator designed by General Instrument) used by (and for) the Amstrad CPC, MSX and Spectrum. It can be used for games and demos due to its minimal use of CPU and RAM, the player takes little code and all musics are compressed.

Finally, you can use cpcwyzlib by Raul Simarro, an Amstrad CPC library to play wyztracker tunes with SDCC. He also wrote the cpcrslib used with z88dk.



Nightshift, an Amstrad CPC music compilation by Mr_Lou

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Nightshift is a compilation of 11 musics by Mr_Lou, artwork by BlueAngel, code by Kevin Thacker (aka arnoldemu) and catart by tastefulmrship.

loading screen of the Nightshift music compilation by Mr_Lou








Nebulus : theme remix, video longplay and remake

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A remake of the Nebulus music is available on Youtube by Alpiso.

That was a hard game, I only went to the second tower (and there are 8 of them), so if you want to see all towers, here is a longplay of Nebulus by Wanderlain on Youtube.

You can also play remakes of Nebulus : Tower Toppler for windows, linux, BeOS and MacOS X, or Power Toppler for Iphone with 2 missions of 8 towers, it has been developped by Silver Software (the game cost 0,79 €).

loading screen of the Amstrad CPC game Nebulus






Contests results of the Amstrad CPC meeting ReSeT #0

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Here are the results of the 4 contests of the ReSeT #0 meeting (and soon they will be available for download) :

  • demo : Krusty with the demo Les experts à Coutances
  • 4 Ko intro : Krusty with Still the best
  • graphics : Rahow with LittleDGirl (on CPC+)
  • music : McKlain with Take Off

See below for the photo of Krusty the winner (on the left), and Beb (on the right) who made a graph for the demo Les experts à Coutances.

Krusty to the left, Beb to the right



Number doesnt matter

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Size doesnt matter by SuperSly (Les sucres en morceaux) let me think about an Amstrad CPC demo or music made on more than an Amstrad CPC. Alas, I am no genius, some people have already done that on ZX Spectrum with a music Hung up by Ay Riders made on 2 Spectrum for example. It's a nice music by the way. If you know about other demos or musics made on more than 1 8bit or 16bit computer, let me know please.



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