Laxity (Thomas E. Petersen)

Danish composer-coder who started, aged 14 in 1987, by turning rob-hubbard's player into source: "Laxity is a little smart kid, he turns Hubbard's player into assembler source, and after having hacked some tunes in it, he starts to change the player to meet his own needs, eventually, turning the player into his own, and at some point throws it out completely, and writes his own from scratch" — with johannes-bjerregaard and Kim Jensen "the first who write their own routines" in the scene (source: s-recollection-brief-history-of-sid).

Facts#

• Member of maniacs-of-noise from December 1989 or early 1990 to the present; joined by 1990-03-15 after Deenen phoned him; kept his own driver rather than Deenen's musicfile; on the Game Boy Color, Thomas Mogensen's music "is in Petersen's driver" (source: s-vgmpf-maniacs-of-noise).
• Seen from JCH's side (2017 memoir): in early 1988 JCH reverse-engineered Laxity's player ("used almost no CPU time and sounded bloody great") and composed ~6 tunes in it, until Laxity told him at the Dexion Meeting (July 1988) "it wasn't a good idea that I was using his player" — "he actually did the scene a great favor", pushing JCH to write NewPlayer (jch-editor). Laxity joined Vibrants in September 1990 and "later even created a new player version for my C64 editor" — the line that becomes NewPlayer 21 below; JCH also names him among those who figured out hard-restart independently, and converted his The Alibi and Star Dream to AdLib (sources: s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles, s-chordian-player-editor-notes).
• Named by jeroen-tel in 2014 among the MoN members making music for fun (source: s-hugi38-interview-jeroen-tel).

Tiny players (2005)#

• For the tiny-sid-compo Laxity wrote two players on the C64 in TASM and printed their sources in SIDin: TPlayer 01.g0 ("Coded on 25th of March 2005", tune Twone Five, 2nd of the 512-byte category) — sequences of note / duration / wave-pointer bytes, instruments as two parallel wave tables (control byte; relative or absolute note), AD $03 for all voices, SR per voice, hard restart "always enabled" two frames before a note ends, a transpose table on the bass, and a frequency table computed from 24 top-octave bytes ("82 bytes instead of 188"); his own header: "No vibrato, no slide, no tie notes" (source: s-sidin08-tiny-sid-512b).
• TinyPlayer 02.g0 ("Coded on 13th of April 2005", tune Repeat Me, 3rd of the 256-byte category): one hard-coded instrument ($21, AD = SR = $55, gate off at the end of every note), pattern bytes with note and octave nibbles, 12 stored pitches with the lower octaves shifted at run time, raster-line timing after sei (source: s-sidin09-tiny-sid-256b). His banner in both: "Laxity of Vibrants/Maniacs of Noise".

In SIDin (2007)#

• Interviewed by mail in January 2007, aged 33, married with two children, living near Aarhus and working as a game programmer since 2001 (hired for a Game Boy Advance game, then PC/Xbox, GameCube, Java phones); introduced as "a member of Vibrants and Maniacs of Noise groups" who "recently started to compose again with sid" (source: s-sidin11-laxity-interview).
• On starting in Hubbard's player: "relatively difficult, but not an experience that taught me coding but merely a basic understanding of how pointers work … The most difficult was actually making the music" (hubbard-player). Why he writes drivers: "It satisfies me to both program the driver AND compose the music, as I somehow regard that as the full package of making music on the c64" (source: s-sidin11-laxity-interview).
• Ten C64 sound drivers in his sources: four from 1987–91 (three used publicly), then after 2005 the JCH player ("which took a long time to do"), three for SID Factory and two for a Tiny Sid compo (tiny-sid-compo); since 1991 also drivers for the Amiga, Game Boy, PC and GBA, all but the PC one built on the C64 drivers' structure (sid-player-routine) (source: s-sidin11-laxity-interview).
• SID Factory, his first tracker, grew out of writing the JCH editor's driver — "takes off in the JCH Editor platform": a driver/editor integration protocol so that "I can create table setups defined in the drivers, instead of having to write a driver that uses tables as defined in the editor", and separate instrument and command columns. Version 0.5 was on CSDb by January 2007 (requests: a STOP command, multiple tunes, cursor jumps from pointers into tables); a 0.6 with integration changes was unreleased. Tognon's comparison with ninjatracker documents its two drivers, v5.0x (calculated vibrato, multispeed) and v6.0x (fast, about $18 rasterlines) — see sid-factory-ii (sources: s-sidin11-laxity-interview, s-sidin11-sid-factory-vs-ninjatracker).
• Tastes: uses the 6581 but listens to a tune on the chip it was written for; favourite composers Hein Holt, Goto80, aleksi-eeben, and of the classics rob-hubbard ("all time favourite"), martin-galway, fred-gray; his own worst: the conversions James Bond, The Pink Panther, I Wanna Dance with Somebody. richard-bayliss named him among the best scene musicians of 2006 (sources: s-sidin11-laxity-interview, s-sidin10-bayliss-interview).

In the SIDin news (2005–2007)#

• JCH NewPlayer 21: "the player coded by Laxity to use with JCH" (chordian's editor) — 21.g4 Final (January 2006) fixed a vibrato overflow and an initialisation bug; 21.g5 Final (May 2006) fixed a live-play retrigger bug and added the $FE stop in the pattern list (source: s-sidin-news-digest). His NP21 line lives on: cheesecutter's player is "based on NP21.G4 by Laxity / Vibrants / MoN", forked by abaddon as NP21.B6 for the 2-series (source: s-cheesecutter-guide).
• SID Factory 0.05 (alpha 1) (reported 2007-02-14): "a new editor system, developed by Laxity of Vibrants/Maniacs of Noise", JCH-like in look but "programmed from scratch", with loadable multispeed (v5) and low-rastertime (v6) players — the start of the line that leads to sid-factory-ii (source: s-sidin-news-digest).
• Tiny Sid Compo (2005): 3rd in the 256-byte class with "Repeat me" and 2nd in the 512-byte class with "Twone Five" (tiny-sid-compo); HVSC 46 (2007-01-21) greeted him "churning out blips and blops again, as if it was 1989!" (source: s-sidin-news-digest).

Related#

maniacs-of-noise · rob-hubbard · sid-player-routine · johannes-bjerregaard

Sources#

s-recollection-brief-history-of-sid · s-vgmpf-maniacs-of-noise · s-hugi38-interview-jeroen-tel · s-sidin08-tiny-sid-512b · s-sidin09-tiny-sid-256b · s-sidin11-laxity-interview · s-sidin11-sid-factory-vs-ninjatracker · s-sidin10-bayliss-interview · s-sidin-news-digest · s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles · s-chordian-player-editor-notes · s-cheesecutter-guide