David Whittaker

British game composer of the 8-bit era with his own C64 driver; rob-hubbard's favourite alongside martin-galway — "both friends" — and one of the people he was still in touch with in 1997 (source: s-sidmusic-hubbard-interviews). The wiki knows two of his routines from the code: the minimal Lazy Jones player and the full Panther driver (whittaker-player).

Facts#

• Lazy Jones (1984): sidin #2 (pp. 10–20) reverse-engineers its routine — raw two-voice frequency lists with equal note lengths and no effects (sources: s-sidin02-matt-gray-driller, s-realdmx-fredgray-kimmel-whittaker).
• Panther (1986, Mastertronic): a three-voice driver with tracks of patterns, command prefixes for waveform, ADSR, tempo, arpeggio, vibrato, accelerating slides, pulse bounce and an alternate-frame noise drum — no instrument table, the timbre is whatever the last prefixes set; the original handled several tunes per game (source: s-realdmx-fredgray-kimmel-whittaker).
• JCH's 2018 verdict lists him among the "overrated": "musical fast food", with Lazy Jones as the exception (source: s-chordian-sid-musicians).
• SIDId: David_Whittaker (source: s-sidid-player-list).

• The Lazy Jones routine in detail: 20 pieces of 32 steps × 4 bytes (two voices' frequencies), a fixed 12-frame step, sawtooth with attack/decay $66 and no sustain/release, the gate toggled $20→$21 on every note, at most 4 raster lines; tune 1 chains tunes 10 and 11; the HVSC rip comes from a cracked version with a faulty unused track. Tognon: "You probably will be surprise to see a so simple engine gives this magic music: maybe it is all David talent!" — see whittaker-player (source: s-sidin02-whittaker-lazy-jones). luca-carrafiello names him first among his favourite SID composers (source: s-sidin01-carrafiello-interview).

• chris-abbott (2003) picks 180 and BMX Simulator as the Whittaker SIDs he liked (source: s-sidin04-abbott-interview).

• Red Max was covered in 512 bytes by Stefano Tognon for the 2006 tiny-sid-compo (RM): Tognon describes the original's voice-3 four-note arpeggio under a long pulse sweep, a voice-1 drum built from three instruments with an octave arpeggio, a long falling portamento, and eight ADSR/waveform instruments (source: s-sidin10-tiny-sid-2-part-1).

Related#

whittaker-player · rob-hubbard · martin-galway · sidin · sid-player-routine · sidid

Sources#

s-sidmusic-hubbard-interviews · s-chordian-sid-musicians · s-sidin02-matt-gray-driller · s-realdmx-fredgray-kimmel-whittaker · s-sidid-player-list · s-sidin02-whittaker-lazy-jones · s-sidin01-carrafiello-interview · s-sidin04-abbott-interview · s-sidin10-tiny-sid-2-part-1