4mat

Scene musician-coder whose 512-byte Empty won the tiny-sid-compo 512-byte category in 2005, and one of the most-quoted voices in the wiki's chipmusic.org threads — dissecting SID tunes from siddump logs, posting the "metal noise" control-byte list and recommending reSID-fp (sources: s-sidin08-tiny-sid-512b, s-chipmusic-sid-music-hints-n-tips).

Facts#

• Empty (512 bytes, 1st at 206 points in the 2005 tiny-sid-compo): "For PAL machines, tested on 6581 chip. Source compiled with C64ASM." The player computes its frequency table from 12 bytes, keeps proper song/pattern structure in 128 bytes of pattern space, and packs each of its 7 instruments into five bytes — an SR (no AD), a pulse-add per frame, a pulse high byte with a loop point, and three pitch/arpeggio plus three waveform entries; every note starts with $09 (test + gate) in the control byte (hard-restart, chord-arpeggio, wavetable-programming). His own caveat: "I only have one counter for both data & waveform to save memory, so any instrument that loops can't use release value" (source: s-sidin08-tiny-sid-512b).
• His 12-byte frequency list travelled: stefano-tognon's Tiny Sid 2 entry RM builds its note table from 12 octave-0 low bytes (12, 28, 45, 62, 81, 102, 123, 145, 169, 195, 221, 250) explicitly "taken from 4mat" (source: s-sidin10-tiny-sid-2-part-1).
• Thread starter on chipmusic-org (2013, "sid music hints'n'tips"): uses siddump to dissect tunes and once tried a siddump-log → goattracker instrument converter "but didn't get it working"; posted the "metal noise" list of noise-combined control-byte values (kept on sid and wavetable-programming); read Gallefoss's 5× Electronic Transfer from a dump — the lead's attack "is just pitching up from a lower note over a few frames", the echo is the preset looping "with the gate off so it fades out", the PWM adds "about $40 on each player tick", the bass "is a sample loop" (multispeed, fake-echo, pitch-slide-and-portamento); on SID noise: "it's the most versatile noise osc on 8-bit hardware" (source: s-chipmusic-sid-music-hints-n-tips).
• Emulation advice (2012 thread): pick reSID-fp in vice for "filter distortion, compression, general ADSR accuracy" (source: s-chipmusic-c64-music-for-dummies).
• Reputation beyond the C64: balrog named "4-mat" in the Amiga half of his tracker dream team in a January 1996 TraxWeekly interview, alongside Audiomonster, Dizzy, Jogeir, Heatbeat and Nuke (source: s-tw042-interview-balrog).

The wiki has no biographical data (name, country, groups) for 4mat; what it knows is his code and his forum readings of other people's tunes.

Related#

tiny-sid-compo · siddump · chipmusic-org · hard-restart · chord-arpeggio · wavetable-programming · multispeed · vice · sid · frantic

Sources#

s-sidin08-tiny-sid-512b · s-sidin10-tiny-sid-2-part-1 · s-chipmusic-sid-music-hints-n-tips · s-chipmusic-c64-music-for-dummies · s-tw042-interview-balrog