Driller (Matt Gray, 1987)

matt-gray's breakthrough tune for Incentive Software's 3D game (1987; the SID header says "1988 Incentive"): "They wanted something long and epic, not short and repetitive … exactly the sort of thing I had been waiting to get my teeth into musically." It took four weeks, "including an almost two-week pause in the middle when the Great Storm of 1987 struck the UK" — "I went straight in, fired up the assembler and carried on composing" (source: s-c64com-matt-gray-interview).

Facts#

• "Once I had Driller out, things got easier and not long after that, I went exclusive for system-3"; one of the three tunes Gray picks as his best (source: s-c64com-matt-gray-interview).
• Its player is the documented one: Stefano Tognon reverse-engineered the HVSC rip in sidin #2 (2002) — songs, tracks, pattern bytes $FA–$FF, two 8-byte instrument tables, arpeggio tables, the vibrato cycle, 10–34 raster lines — see matt-gray-player (source: s-sidin02-matt-gray-driller). The rip lacks the game's sound effects and contains an unused pattern (source: s-sidin02-matt-gray-driller).
• The listing is available as an ACME source that builds a .sid (source: s-realdmx-sid-players).
• Later reuse: the Amiga version (1988), Seiklus (2003, from the Amiga version) and VVVVVV (2010, the C64 tune); Gray also promised "a Driller prequel" among the new SIDs of his 2014 Kickstarter (sources: s-vgmpf-matt-gray, s-matt-gray-dominator-source).

• "The longest time on one track was Driller partly because it was so long in itself, but also I'd started it a few days before the 87 hurricane struck"; a modern extended version was promised for the album (source: s-vandalism63-matt-gray-interview). The composition he thinks best captured its game: "Probably Driller in that respect" (source: s-rvg-matt-gray-interview).

Where the Driller build sits (SIDin #15)#

• Tognon's 2015 ordering of the three Gray engines he has read is Driller → Serpent Demo → Dominator: the Serpent Demo's SID side is "the same of Driller engine" — duration $FD kk, arpeggio from instrument byte 5, pulse limits fixed at $08/$0E — with a sample track added (matt-gray-player; source: s-sidin15-serpent-demo-player). Gray dates the writing of the player at "about 4-6 months" plus 18 months of refinement (source: s-sidin15-matt-gray-interview).

What the later players added to it#

Tognon's 2015 reading of the Dominator build ("PLAYER V4.2") doubles as a list of what the Driller engine did not have — the clearest measure of how far Gray's driver travelled in two years (source: s-sidin14-dominator-player):

• Durations in one byte. V4.2 encodes them in the note stream as $70–$F9 (kk − $70 frames); Driller spent two bytes on $FD kk.
• Arpeggio as a pattern command. V4.2's $FD CI (C notes from table I) is per-note; in Driller the arpeggio came from a byte of the instrument, so it changed only when the instrument did (chord-arpeggio).
• Per-instrument pulse limits ($LH, bouncing between $0Lxx and $0Hxx) — "in Driller it was fixed into the source" (pulse-width-modulation).
• A hat effect (a brief noise burst at $50xx after each duration decrement) and an automatic fade-out at the end of a tune — "not present into Driller".

His own summary of the job, from a third telling: it was "challenging because it was so long", and the Great Storm left him "without power for nearly 2 weeks" in the middle of it (source: s-retrogamesmaster-matt-gray-interview).

Related#

matt-gray · matt-gray-player · sidin · last-ninja-2 · dominator · hvsc

Sources#

s-c64com-matt-gray-interview · s-sidin02-matt-gray-driller · s-vgmpf-matt-gray · s-realdmx-sid-players · s-matt-gray-dominator-source · s-vandalism63-matt-gray-interview · s-rvg-matt-gray-interview · s-sidin15-serpent-demo-player · s-sidin15-matt-gray-interview · s-sidin14-dominator-player · s-retrogamesmaster-matt-gray-interview