R-Tape wrote: ↑Mon Sep 30, 2019 9:13 pmSir Lancelot is a fantastic game, but it must have one of the most annoying uses of the beeper. Being quite hard, you experience it a lot—the funeral march, followed by a long pitch bend, none of which can be interrupted. No wonder POKEs evolved to get around that specific 'feature'.
I don't remember that about Sir Lancelot, think I was deafened by how much game they got into 16k. It's a real affliction!
But yeah, are you ever right, been playing a lot of early 80's arcade games on MAME recently and one thing I have noticed myself (that I'm very glad gaming grew out of), is the need for a whole little monophonic beeper tone, one for dying, then a fanfare immediately after announcing your next life. All as you say, unskippable. Probably a lot of the early Speccy games were influenced from that and there are so many tone deaf versions of the funeral march out there it's not as funny as it should be.
R-Tape wrote: ↑Mon Sep 30, 2019 9:13 pmSir Lancelot is a fantastic game, but it must have one of the most annoying uses of the beeper. Being quite hard, you experience it a lot—the funeral march, followed by a long pitch bend, none of which can be interrupted. No wonder POKEs evolved to get around that specific 'feature'.
It's odd that in the same vain when Abide with Me played each time you died in WANTED:Monty Mole it never really annoyed me.
And how could we forget the sound effects of The Way Of The Exploding Fist? Especially the flying-kick-in-the-face and punch-in-the-groin. Very satisfiying (when performed on your opponent of course )
The sound from Dynamite Dan when you lose a life is excellent, it always stands out for me because before I heard that, I didn't know that the Spectrum could be coerced into making that kind of noise. But all the sound in both Dynamite Dan games is great. It's no real surprise that Rod Bowkett was a musician in his day job. Really wish he'd written some more games.
Fahnn wrote: ↑Thu Oct 03, 2019 4:44 pm
The sound from Dynamite Dan when you lose a life is excellent, it always stands out for me because before I heard that, I didn't know that the Spectrum could be coerced into making that kind of noise. But all the sound in both Dynamite Dan games is great. It's no real surprise that Rod Bowkett was a musician in his day job. Really wish he'd written some more games.
Good call, and easier to rip the code than I imagined. It'd be interesting to know how Rod wrote the amazing title music, given that the beep engine is pretty simple. (Actually I wonder what Mozart would make if it).
I didn't play DD2 back in the day, but looking at them now it seems less attention was paid to sound in the sequel.
That flashing teleporter alarm noise really takes me back!
Melbourne House used to have very distinctive sound effects, starting with the kick and punch on Exploding Fist,present all the way down to Street Hassle. Whaam Music Box have those sounds as percussion, so you can hear the effects on the music of some titles like The Trap Door.
catmeows wrote: ↑Tue Oct 08, 2019 8:25 am
And has to say I was quite impressed by fx inBuzzsaw .
Aye these are good. I bet there aren't any sound engines quite like this one! I tried to reproduce it with loops, but nope, I just couldn't get it to sound right.
Gilligan's Gold has some distinctive spot effects. Most people will hear the death sound effect quite a lot. The music is ace too. That's another one that I tried to rip, but I got a surprise when looking at the code. It uses CALL 950 (just after the DI of CALL 949) to generate the sound, and much of the game engine seems to be the interrupt routine. So (assuming I understood it correctly) the 'game' is the thing interrupting the sound engine. Is that rare? It's an interesting idea.