Future Composer (C64)

The scene editor of 1988 built on the first maniacs-of-noise player: "Another player cracked: Future Composer! It's released by Finnish Gold. It's the first TMC/MON player, but Finnish Gold had made an editor for it. Many start using this and I guess, the largest share of unknown composer tunes are made with this. There would arrive entire disks, just with music files on them and no info on who actually made them" (source: s-recollection-brief-history-of-sid). A Lemon64 poster puts it more bluntly: "future composer is made from a ripped MON player" (source: s-cybernoid-behind-the-notes).

Facts#

• Finnish Gold also made an editor for Ben Daglish's WEMUSIC player, "but nobody really seemed to be able to use that" (source: s-recollection-brief-history-of-sid).
• The relation to Deenen's musicfile is asserted by both sources but not documented in the wiki's copies of either program (unverified).

• A Plus/4 conversion existed: luca-carrafiello composed his first SIDs "on a converted version of the Future Composer V2.1" on a Commodore Plus/4, later on "an improved FC's SIDversion" for the SIDcard, and blames "the three default filtereffects offered by the old Future Composer" for how his Tubular Bells II Shake sounds on a real SID (source: s-sidin01-carrafiello-interview).

Its signature in the Lostack database (2004)#

• The entry Tognon uses as his worked example: Name=FUTURE COMPOSER 1.0, ID=$0006:$AD, ID=$0007:$74, ID=$0009:$C9, ID=$000A:$02, OrderPos=$0921,$0922,$0923, SecPos=$0924,$0924,$0926 — four bytes six positions into the file (the LDA $xx74 and CMP #$02 of the init code) plus the addresses of the per-voice track and pattern positions. "There are more than 1000 tunes in HVSC that use this player." In his example /VARIOUS/G-L/Luca/Moonlight_shadow.sid, loaded at $1800, the track bytes are compared with $FE and $FF as end marks — $FF clears both positions (restart), $FE sets the flag that makes the play call return at once — and a byte with bit 7 set is masked AND #$1F, one with bit 6 set AND #$3F, before a pattern pointer is fetched (source: s-sidin05-pattern-searching-2; player-identification).

To verify#

• (unverified) The AND #$1F / AND #$3F track bytes match the transpose ($80–$fd, & $1f) and repeat ($40–$5f, & $3f) sequence bytes of Deenen's musicfile — a code-level hint for the "FC is a MoN player" claim above, read from the listing, not stated by Tognon.

• One of the editors dustbin started on at 15, given to him by a member of F4CG in Ferrara: "I started typing shit in it until I was able to produce something 'ear-able'" (source: s-sidin07-dustbin-interview).

• richard-bayliss tried Future Composer V4 after Music Assembler and Voicetracker: "it wasn't that easy to use", and moved on to DMC V2.0, whose utility disk had example tunes to learn from (source: s-sidin10-bayliss-interview).

• scarzix moved to Future Composer from soundmonitor for "a whole new sound and much better drums than I had ever been able to make in Soundmonitor", wrote his Triangle Demo of the Year 88 tunes in it, and left it for the jch-editor (chordian) when the CombatZone project began (source: s-sidin14-scarzix-interview).
• JCH tried it exactly once, right when it "had just been released at the party" (Dexion Meeting, July 1988), and rejected it: "Voices were not compared directly and it had always been one of my dreams that a music editor should be able to do that"; both Soundmonitor's and Future Composer's sounds became "trite" — the mark of groups "that didn't have access to unique music in special players" (tracker-scene-history; source: s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles).

Related#

musicfile · maniacs-of-noise · charles-deenen · tracker-scene-history · soundmonitor

Sources#

s-recollection-brief-history-of-sid · s-cybernoid-behind-the-notes · s-sidin01-carrafiello-interview · s-sidin05-pattern-searching-2 · s-sidin07-dustbin-interview · s-sidin10-bayliss-interview · s-sidin14-scarzix-interview · s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles