Comments on: One-Line C64 BASIC Music

By: Dan Laskowski

Dan Laskowski — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 17:22:37 +0000

Greetings! what an interesting idea! RANDOM MUSIC!!

I have recently decided to re-release my 1984 C64 SID lead synthesizer called Fastfingers. I’m getting amazing response, considering that it is 27 year old. If response is big enough I may even develop Fastfingers II . However , the 27 pages of source code don’t look as familiar to me as they were 27 years ago. I used only a few comments.

I have tried it on the VICE emulator and noticed that the sounds are OUT OF TUNE on the Vice. I hope that your emulator is IN TUNE.

Check out the fastfingers link below complete with video demo to see what the buzz is about.

http://musicinit.com/fastfingers.php

By: jill/txt » lesson plan: BASIC for DIKULT104

jill/txt » lesson plan: BASIC for DIKULT104 — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 09:53:42 +0000

[...] Another very short art piece in BASIC is 10 poke 54272+int(rnd(1)25),int(rnd(1)256) : goto 10 by Noah Vawter - this code generates 18 minutes of sound on a C64 (review by Nick Montfort). [...]

By: Nick Montfort

Nick Montfort — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 04:59:13 +0000

claus, thanks for your comment, which not only gave us some music – it also revealed a bug in the “Markdown for WordPress and bbPress” plugin for WordPress: “/*” isn’t correctly rendered as an asterisk. I fixed this for now by switching to the “Text Control” plugin, which allows me to use Markdown for blog posts but default formatting for comments.

By: claus

claus — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 19:30:45 +0000

cool..how about

10 poke54296,15:poke54272+rnd(1)*23,rnd(1)*256:goto 10

poking 54296 with random values makes my emulator click a lot

also, how about

10 poke54296,15:poke54272+rnd(1)*23,rnd(1)*128+rnd(1)*128:goto 10

..i wonder if the kernal or basic rom has some music in it..

By: Jon Grim

Jon Grim — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 19:06:52 +0000

I came across a web server running on a C64 some time ago it was slow but worked. Its amazing that these old machines still work.

By: Eddie

Eddie — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 08:02:00 +0000

That’s pretty awesome. It amazes me what people can still do with a C=64.

By: Nick Montfort

Nick Montfort — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 22:21:16 +0000

Jen Bervin, the author of Nets and The Desert (books created by erasure), is working on a book based on A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates.

Also, check out the more than 100 reviews of that book on Amazon.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 21:34:28 +0000

Love the detail about seeding the RND function to generate a predictable sequence of pseudorandom integers! Does this make the distinction between “song” and “song-making machine”?

Random numbers also play an interesting role in your thread demo. Pulling a value off of the SID is an elegant shortcut to randomness.

I’d love to see a historical look at randomness in the history of computing. e.g. I’ve seen some programs use the milliseconds digit from the UNIX time function.

My fave reflection on randomness is Tom Jenning’s review of a Rand Corp book titled, “A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates” (nice beach reading): http://www.wps.com/J/million/index.html

Incidentally, it’s the same random technology used in the Lone Wolf playable book series! http://www.projectaon.org/en/ReadersHandbook/ExampleRandomNumberTable