Old C64/PC Player/Editor Notes — Chordian (2017)

While compiling his memoir (s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles), chordian scanned the paper notes he kept in the 1980s and 90s for his C64 and PC music players and editors, and published them in five captioned galleries (OldPlayer · NewPlayer · Editor for NewPlayer · AdLib and Sound Blaster · Miscellaneous). The wiki has the captions, not the scans (many are in Danish anyway); the captions alone pin down jch-editor and NewPlayer version numbers, dates and design steps. The blog's own sidebar states the identity plainly: "My alter ego on the Commodore 64 was JCH of Vibrants. I was a coder and a composer."

Key claims#

OldPlayer (1987)

• Most scans are conversion sheets for transferring tunes note by note from Aegis Sonix on the Amiga to OldPlayer on the C64. One set is dated 1987-12-18 and records that composing the tune took three days on the Amiga and writing it down about five hours; "The OldPlayer was adapted on December 21, and I typed in all of the notes the day after. That took 3 and half hours to do." A September 1987 tune: composed in half a day, written down in two hours. One page shows he was "a member of Galaxy at the time".
• The editor for OldPlayer was never made, but the notes trace the design lineage of the later jch-editor: the very first ideas "before I saw SoundTracker on Amiga" showed "the notes in horizontal bars"; later notes ditch "making it look like Ubix" for "the design of SoundTracker on Amiga" — "the beginning of the idea of having note columns going downwards" (tracker).

NewPlayer (1989–91)

• Named versions with the NN.GN scheme: notes for NewPlayer 10.G0 "packer and relocator"; "improving the next NewPlayer 15.G7"; and "the hard restart implementation in NewPlayer 17.G1. And a lot of arbitrary hexadecimal numbers" — a dated-on-paper confirmation that hard-restart entered the NewPlayer line at 17.G1 (the Lostack database names exactly JCH 02/NEWPLAYER V17.G1; see s-sidin05-pattern-searching-2 via sidid).
• Two scans cover "the pointers in the area right before the C64 editor player code in $1000" — the classic SID load address (sid-player-routine).
• A separate SFX player "could do a lot more sound effect tricks than the music player"; a splitter program could "spread the player and data out into several smaller memory chunks". Sound-effect lists survive for Brubaker (Byteriders), Harald Hårdtand, Skærmtrolden Hugo, Orcus ("a game that was never finished") and Su-Sweet (Double Density).
• Music-theory notes for his tune Revenge: "I added up chords from the tonal note of the scale … to be absolutely sure there would be no disharmonic errors while also using a lot more varied chords than I usually did at the time" (chord-arpeggio).

Editor for NewPlayer

• A gallery of idea and design notes for "my NewPlayer music editor on C64", one page dated May 1989 — the editor was live by then (v2 December 1988 per s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles), so these are evolution notes, not the first sketch.

AdLib and Sound Blaster (1991–92)

• PC music player ideas dated December 1991 and January 1992; the player's header format dated March 1992; AdLib editor ideas dated 1991-08-10 and February 1992 (opl-fm-instruments) — so the editor was being sketched before the player coding began (November 1991 per the memoir).
• A candidate list of C64 tunes to convert to AdLib/SB: "Only laxity's The Alibi and Star Dream were eventually transferred among these."
• SFX lists for the PC Harald Hårdtand (February 1992) and Lollypop (November 1992, including the "Spooksville" level and "a little bit of 8086 assembler code").

Miscellaneous

• "A list of the guys that had a copy of my C64 music editor, complete with the special byte code that was implemented into each of their personal copies of it", plus a continuation with a to-ask list — "Zenox of Starion actually rejected it." This is the paper trail behind the controlled distribution described in the memoir and in s-sidin14-scarzix-interview.
• A draft magazine article "describes how to utilize the test-bit in the sid chip when composing tunes" — the noise/oscillator-reset trick Johannes Bjerregaard discovered at JCH's place (s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles).
• A notebook of "chord counts" he "referred to … when constructing arpeggio chords in my old SID tunes" (chord-arpeggio, instrument-tables).
• A draft reply to Barry Simpson of hewson "that had showed some interest in my music for C64 games. I don't think much came of it"; and the draft of his second reply to Charles Deenen "after he had turned down the C64 music in my first sending … the second sending where he would end up getting impressed by the Push-It tune" (charles-deenen).
• A 2018 comment by Joost Anbeek: "I remember using the player in assembler intros when I was 15" — a stray data point on how far NewPlayer spread beyond the editor's user list.
• The sidebar's "Noteworthy Links" put sid-factory-ii ("A cross-platform editor with reSID emulator") and DeepSID first — Chordian's present-day projects on the same page as his JCH history.

Practical takeaways#

• Concrete version pegs for a jch-editor/NewPlayer chronology: 10.G0 (with packer and relocator), 15.G7, 17.G1 (hard restart), editor player code at $1000 — the NN.GN version scheme matching sidid's JCH_NewPlayer V1–V20 signatures and the Lostack V17.G1 label.
• The horizontal-bars → SoundTracker-style downward columns progression is the earliest documented step toward the stacked track view that cheesecutter inherited.

Notable quotes#

"My alter ego on the Commodore 64 was JCH of Vibrants. I was a coder and a composer."

"Notes about the hard restart implementation in NewPlayer 17.G1. And a lot of arbitrary hexadecimal numbers."

Relevance to the wiki#

Companion piece to s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles: paper-dated evidence for the jch-editor page (NewPlayer versions, the byte-coded user list, the SFX player, the splitter, the $1000 layout), for hard-restart (implemented in NewPlayer 17.G1), and for the JCH = Chordian identity (chordian). Also feeds charles-deenen (the Push-It correspondence drafts), hewson, laxity (the two AdLib conversions) and the editor-design history behind cheesecutter and sid-factory-ii.

Pages touched#

chordian · jch-editor · hard-restart · sidid · sid-player-routine · cheesecutter · sid-factory-ii · laxity · charles-deenen · hewson · chord-arpeggio · instrument-tables · sid · tracker · opl-fm-instruments · sound-effects