[Coco] MUSICA 2 files + my first game for 2008

[Roger Taylor]

At 04:33 PM 12/26/2007, you wrote:

>Try wimgtool selecting RAW to ASCII. That should leave the files alone.


I didn't see that option at the time or maybe I'm using an older 
version.  I'll check it out.

I'll probably even try to compose or enter some existing music into 
Musica and try to come up with some arcade jams since most of the 
.mus files I've heard are slow-tempoed and pretty lame (in my 
opinion).  It's probably just that there's no percussion channel and 
it takes a while to tune into the music by ear to recognize the 
song.  I'm sure I can delete the 4th voice and compose a bass line 
that adds a good playing groove to some of the music.

I grabbed the bee.mus song which sounds like bumble bee music which 
sounds good as-is and for now is the main tune for my new game.  I 
didn't have time this month to submit anything to the CoCoNutz! 
e-zine but next month I might write up an article with CCASM source 
code for my background MUSICA driver which can be used in any game 
someone might be writing.  It uses the IRQ and FIRQ interrupts (60hz 
IRQ for the note timer, and the GIME timer FIRQ for the PCM 
pump).  What happens is that the 256-byte waveforms are mixed at FIRQ 
and sent to the DAC fast enough to produce the notes well while the 
game continues to operate as usual.  You can start and stop the music 
by poking to a few variables which IRQ looks for and acts on.  Music 
can also be auto-repeated by inserting a $FD control code for 
the  last note in the song.  The IRQ/FIRQ code does 99% of the 
work.  You just supply the start address of the MUSICA song data, set 
a flag to "ON" and away goes the music in the background.  It's 
similar to poking to the Speech/Sound Pak and having its CPU do the work.

Anyone who's played my Spider-Hype games has an idea of how this 
works.  The new game currently has a firefly theme where you have to 
go through several levels of trapping all the fireflies into various 
shaped hollow boxes/figures that you can open/close with the F1 
key.  My IRQ code also has a color flasher (color #15) that flashes 
anything drawn in that color just like how the ATTR B switch works in 
text mode from Disk BASIC.  I might include that in my e-zine tutorial as well.

Now that so many people own the Rainbow IDE and CCASM, I hope to see 
some new games in 2008, and I'll donate as much code of mine that I 
can dig up to make it even easier to get started.  One could easily 
take my Spider-Hype project for Rainbow and work from there since it 
sets up a 320x16 graphics mode with background music capabilities and 
a color flasher for getting attention as in showing a score or time 
remaining, etc.  You can also flash graphics objects since it's just 
a palette color flipper with almost no CPU overhead.