HVMEC — High Voltage Music Engines Collection

Stefano Tognon's collection of the C64 music-making programs — editors, trackers and their player routines, with binaries, sources, documentation, examples and credits — started in 2003–04 alongside his engine-identification articles in sidin and named after hvsc, whose purpose "is very different": HVSC holds the tunes, HVMEC the tools that made them, "so one people can easy search for a particular one", and it is meant as "a good place for historical engines conservation" (source: s-sidin05-hvmec).

Facts#

• Layout: a DATA tree (programs, docs, sources, examples — large) and a CONTROL tree (one HTML page per engine — small), released offline as HVMEC-x.x-DATA.zip.gz and HVMEC-x.x-CONTROL.zip.gz (versions 0.1, 0.2 …; files split at 1 MB) and online through http://digilander.iol.it/ice00/tsid/hvmec.html; the CONTROL index is a frames page with alphabetical editor and tracker lists and thumbnails (source: s-sidin05-hvmec).
• Editor vs Tracker: both trees split into Editor — "a program where note duration is explicitly declared" (DUR 05 before the notes) — and Tracker — one where "the duration is given by the number of events between two notes" (A4 / --- / --- / B4 …) (tracker) (source: s-sidin05-hvmec).
• Engines and versions: Editor|Tracker / Name_of_Engine / version (e.g. Advanced Music Programmer, SIDwinder; 1.00, v2, A), with [1x]/[2x]/[4x] suffixes when an editor was issued for several tune speeds (multispeed); an editor's alternative player routines (the JCH editor is the example — chordian) sit in a [] directory with a page per routine (source: s-sidin05-hvmec).
• Provenance: executables gathered from the web "and I hope that they are provided by the authors for free download", removed on request; free hosting that may move, mirrors wanted; new versions when enough engines or credits change; a "sample" category planned for sample-capable engines (chip-samples) (source: s-sidin05-hvmec).
• Why it exists: to find a tool "for starting making sid music into your C64", and to supply known players for signature building — "you can use the players for founding the right pattern for the pattern searching engine project" (player-identification) (sources: s-sidin05-hvmec, s-sidin05-pattern-searching-2).

Versions (from the SIDin editorials and news)#

• Announced in sidin #5 (2004-01-11) as a project that "collects and give credits to (all) the available C64 tools for made music"; 0.3 "in high working stage" in #6 (2004-05-08) with a new Other category for "programs that don't fit in the Tracker/Editor as they manage only sample or sound effects" (source: s-sidin-news-digest).
• 0.4, 2005-06-02: "83 editors, 53 trackers and 24 other kinds of music programs" — added, among others, DMC v4.0y, future-composer v2.2, TFX 2.97, Voicetracker V4.0/V5.0, Music Construction Set, Digitronix V1, Hardtrack Composer V1.0, rockmonitor VI, Cynthcart and Pro-Drum V2.0 (source: s-sidin-news-digest).
• 0.9 (reported 2010-06-28): 140 editors, 84 trackers, 70 other programs; a Wordpress version planned at hvmec.hellospace.net/blog. By 2015 the collection was being rebuilt "from scratch to a dynamic site: hvmec.altervista.org", "at 73% of completion" (source: s-sidin-news-digest).

Related#

hvsc · sidin · player-identification · sidid · tracker · tracker-scene-history · sid-player-routine · chordian

Sources#

s-sidin05-hvmec · s-sidin05-pattern-searching-2 · s-sidin-news-digest