Monty on the Run (C64, 1985)

rob-hubbard's theme for Gremlin Graphics' Monty on the Run. Newman cites it (with Crazy Comets) for the driver's signature combination of a "skydive" — a slow downward pitch fall — with an octave arpeggio; Hubbard: "The middle section was an excuse to use the new pitch bend code that I wrote for this project" (source: s-newman-driving-the-sid-chip). See pitch-slide-and-portamento and octave-bass.

From the interviews#

• In July 1986 Hubbard named it, with Zoids, as one of his two "absolute" favourites (source: s-sidmusic-hubbard-interviews); martin-galway listed it among the few tunes by others he liked (source: s-remix64-galway-interview).
• The sequel's title music, Auf Wiedersehen Monty, is a co-production with Ben Daglish because "Gremlin thought that the original Monty On The Run was very popular and they just didn't want to totally move away from what I did on the original, so they asked me to spend 2 days working with Ben at their office" (source: s-sidmusic-hubbard-interviews).

The sequel's bass drum, frame by frame#

Auf Wiedersehen Monty is a different Hubbard tune — the sequel's title music, written with Ben Daglish as above — and its bass drum is the wiki's best-documented Hubbard drum. Thorsten Klose traced it from a siddump register dump of channel 2 at 0:38, one row per 20 ms frame (source: s-ucapps-wavetable-sounds-tutorial-1):

Absolute pitches, in steps of +26 / −31 / −3 / −15 semitones (+$1A, −$1F, −$03, −$0F) — which is why such a drum needs absolute notes in a wave table; the gate is released on the fourth frame so the release does the fade, and on a real chip the first (triangle) frame is swallowed by the envelope's gate delay unless the release is 0 (hard-restart). Klose: "this tune impressed me so much in the 80s, that I was never be able to forget those groove drums" (source: s-ucapps-wavetable-sounds-tutorial-1). The translation into a goattracker / sid-wizard table is on wavetable-programming. A 2020s enthusiast site lists Monty on the Run with commando and International Karate+ as Hubbard's iconic titles (source: s-commodore-64-eu-sid-chip; secondary).

The tune in its driver#

Anthony McSweeney's commented disassembly of the Monty driver, with the whole main theme as data, is in the realdmx collection (source: s-realdmx-hubbard-player; the format is on hubbard-player):

• One song of three tracks (65, 77 and 129 pattern entries, ending in $ff = restart) over 60 patterns and 20 instruments; the tempo counter is $01, so a tick is two frames and a note length of $03 is 8 frames.
• Instrument 0, which opens the melody patterns (ptn00: $83,$00,$37 …), is $80,$09,$41,$48,$60,$03,$81,$00 — pulse at width $0980, attack/decay $48, sustain/release $60, vibrato depth 3, a pulse sweep with delay 1 and step $80. The "first skydive" instrument is $00,$09,$41,$3f,$ff,$01,$e7,$02 — sustain/release $ff so the note keeps sounding through its extensions while the frequency falls.
• The middle section (ptn30–ptn33) is where the "new pitch bend code" lives: notes like $af,$90,$35 (32 ticks, bend up 16 per frame), $a7,$99,$37 (bend down 24), $a3,$e8,$35 (bend up 104) — the portamento is a per-note second byte, not an instrument setting (pitch-slide-and-portamento).
• The bass patterns are octave figures on one voice (ptn02: $83,$02,$13,$03,$13,$03,$1f,$03,$1f … — G-1, G-1, G-2, G-2 with instrument 2), and the drum patterns (ptn2c, ptn2d, ptn37) alternate a pulse drum, instrument $0e = $00,$08,$41,$06,$0a,$00,$00,$01, with a noise drum, instrument $0b = $80,$07,$81,$0a,$0a,$00,$00,$01 — both carry the drum flag $01 — see octave-bass and wavetable-programming.

Related#

rob-hubbard · commando · sanxion · wavetable-programming · siddump · hard-restart

Sources#

s-newman-driving-the-sid-chip · s-sidmusic-hubbard-interviews · s-remix64-galway-interview · s-ucapps-wavetable-sounds-tutorial-1 · s-commodore-64-eu-sid-chip · s-realdmx-hubbard-player