Luca Carrafiello (Luca/FIRE)
Italian Plus/4 scener and SID composer of the FIRE crew (Fantastic Italian Research Enterprise), interviewed in the first issue of sidin (September 2002) as the composer of Soulfixer — second in the SidWine online compo, and the tune for which Tognon "buy a C64C recently only for listen this tune in the real 8580 chip!" — and of the last-ninja-2 cover Central_Park_Loader_Y2K (source: s-sidin01-carrafiello-interview). His career is the unusual one of learning the sid without owning a C64.
Facts#
- Born about 1973 (29 in 2002), from Salerno; a physical-chemistry graduate starting a Ph.D. at the University of Florence in 2002; not a coder ("I put some LDA, STA and PLP somewhere and my Plus/4 diskmagazine popped up") (source: s-sidin01-carrafiello-interview).
- Started at 14 on a Commodore Plus/4 — "no hardware sprites, and, most of all, no SID!" — and joined the Plus/4 scene at the beginning of the 1990s as a graphician (logos, pictures, character sets) who "dreamt about composing SID tunes" (source: s-sidin01-carrafiello-interview).
- Composed his first SIDs on a Plus/4 conversion of future-composer V2.1 through the scene's SID-to-Plus/4 converters (one channel alternating two SID voices, later a "wave converter" with correct waveform, volume and SR); those tunes are in hvsc but "many of them sound really bad" on a SID, filters, attack/decay, sync and ring modulation being impossible to emulate on the Plus/4 (source: s-sidin01-carrafiello-interview).
- 1999: bought a SIDcard (a plug-in SID for the Plus/4) from its original producer and composed on "an improved FC's SIDversion"; then used Levente Harsfalvi's (TLC/Coroners) Plus/4 port of Taki's SIDwinder V01.23 for the SIDcard — "only in that moment I'd really understood the real SID operation way, and so I had to learn again how to compose SIDs" (source: s-sidin01-carrafiello-interview).
- Never writes multispeed tunes because his diskmag cannot host them; wants multispeed and digi tunes judged in their own compo category (compos) (source: s-sidin01-carrafiello-interview).
- Runs the Plus/4 LogoCompo (third edition in 2002); a webography of the LoneNews archive, the xeo3.com shoot-'em-up project and the c64.rulez.org Plus/4 archive (source: s-sidin01-carrafiello-interview).
- Own verdicts: Tubular Bells II Shake (a month's work, about 13:30, written without a SID) as the worst on real hardware, Soulfixer as the first he is proud of; favourite composers david-whittaker, jeroen-tel, rob-hubbard, martin-galway, Drax, matt-gray, plus Nigel Grieve's Zynaps prerelease, Nick Jones's Equinox and Jay Derrett's Death or Glory and Counterforce; favourite tunes Wizball, last-ninja-2, Shadow of the Beast, cybernoid, Luminous, Eldorado Part1; on emulators: "a therapy for the scene, but not the panacea" (source: s-sidin01-carrafiello-interview).
Related#
sidin · future-composer · hvsc · multispeed · last-ninja-2 · matt-gray · tracker-scene-history · commodore-64