Ippo gets into the guts of the production of the Rockman Chiptuned record, including discussing working with Hally, name dropping some of your favorite chiptune artists, and generally sounding very enthused about the project.
In this episode, I’m happy to bring you the first part of an interview with Chuck Peddle, lead designer of the 6502 microprocessor, Commodore PET, and many other innovations in the computing industry. In Part I, Chuck talks about his early history in computing, distributed intelligence, and the development and launch of the 6502.
Anders from Chipflip has linked to an interesting interview he conducted with Metin Seven, one of the developers of SIDMon. In it, they discuss the transition from c64 to amiga, and the retro-origin of the intial use of the chiptune term. Great read!
AC: Hi Metin. I’m a tracker musician researching the history of chipmusic for a master thesis. Currently I’m looking the epistemology of the word chipmusic or chiptune. Since you were involved with SIDmon the first synthetic Amiga tracker, right? I wanted to ask if you have any memories of this.Hi Anders. That’s the coolest master thesis subject I’ve heard of so far.
:-SIDmon was indeed the first synth audio editor for the Commodore Amiga. Its name refers to the legendary MOS Technology 6581/8580 SID Sound Interface Device chip, best known from the equally legendary Commodore 64 home computer, the Amiga’s predecessor in terms of Commodore flagships. The “mon” part of SIDmon refers to “monitor” and was inspired by the first music tracker I can remember: Soundmon for the Commodore 64.SIDmon’s interface was primitively designed compared to today’s design standards, SIDmon’s graphics reflected the game-oriented 2D graphics style of those days. It was divided in four parts: a waveform editor for creating synth sounds, a sound sample editor, a pattern editor for arranging the sounds into music patterns, and a song editor where you could combine the patterns into a four-channel song.
Johan Kotlinski (he of LSDJ fame) wrote a extensive overview of Amiga Music programs for a college course. It ahs now been translated to english and posted on chipflip:
As it was written for a technoculture-course at university, there is a relatively extensive historiography of the early demoscene and how it evolved from cracking. This means that the specific Amiga software part starts only half-way through the text. It starts with describing the brief birth of Amiga-trackers in the commercial sphere: Soundtracker didn’t sell well but was reverse engineered and appropriated in the demoscene. It became the dominant software on Amiga, and set standards still used in contemporary trackers such as Renoise.
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