SIDin #10 — Richard Bayliss interview (Stefano Tognon, 2006)

stefano-tognon interviews richard-bayliss, the prolific British C64 game-maker and musician ("maybe you are the unique scener around today that can release a game a week?"), in July 2006 for sidin. The useful part for this wiki is his editor history — Music Assembler, Voicetracker, Future Composer, three versions of DMC, goattracker — and what a DMC user misses in a PC tracker.

Key claims#

• Who: 27 in July 2006, "will be 28 on Christmas Day"; works in a pharmaceutical distribution warehouse. Games since 1991 with the Shoot 'Em Up Construction Kit (SEUCK); learned BASIC game programming and composing in 1994 "after purchasing a utilities tape from a Public Domain library and played around with the editors"; turbo-assembler in 1999; cross-assembly from "2003 (or was it 2004)".
• In development (July 2006): Sub Hunter (after Mastertronic's VIC-20 Sub Hunt, with parallax scrolling and sub-games; hoped for before Christmas 2006) and Crash Course, a co-production with The Art Ravers (a maze/driving game against an opponent, over 20 courses). Music collections on disk ("my DMC albums") — more planned, no date.
• Editors, in order: Music Assembler and Music Mixer Module 5 (formerly Voicetracker) — "small in size and fun to compose"; future-composer V4 "wasn't that easy to use"; DMC V2.0 "a whole lot easier to use, as the utility disk had example tunes. I needed to play around with the example tunes before I was able to create my own instruments"; most used: DMC V4.0 and V5.0. His first DMC V4.0B (by Graffity/Panic Design, from the Magna Musica utility disk) "had a bug in the tune packer"; a fully working version only turned up on the Internet in 2001 (no home Internet 1995–2000). A contact introduced DMC V5.0, "one of the most complex version of DMC at the time", learned by experimenting. GoatTracker occasionally, "but don't feel comfortable with the sounds that are used in this program. It does not beat the traditional real C64 old/new SID chip."
• Missing features: GoatTracker "lacks the real C64 SID environment, which I think would be great if it could emulate exactly the same thing"; he misses DMC V5's sector editor, "where you could try and control filtered sounds to go up or down like in DMC V5 itself" (filter-programming). "It is not a bad composer though."
• Real machine vs emulator: real — vice "does not sync sound correctly when playing C64 games": in a SEUCK game the weapon appears and the shot sound "comes after the weapon move slightly".
• 6581 vs 8580: the 8580, "because of the features with the sound filters. Especially when it comes to using cool composers like DMC V5" (sid).
• Worst / best own tune: the Fake Game title music, composed as a joke; he should have kept it for the 2006 Crap Game compo entry Block Defenz, "but instead I programmed the music with the Turbo Assembler".
• Favourite composers: martin-galway ("amazing ambient tunes, like Insects in Space and Parallax", the Miami Vice title), rob-hubbard (Mega Apocalypse; "his best work had to be Lightforce"), jeroen-tel of maniacs-of-noise ("brilliant tunes for games between 1988 and 1990"), Edwin van Santen (EVS/20CC, who died in May 2006 — a disk with "the entire 20CC music collection between 1988-1991"). Today's best (2006): Drax/MON, Intensity/Cosine, Fanta, laxity. A tribute demo to EVS with his tunes and scroll-text messages was planned for the end of July 2006.
• Best SIDs ever: "hard to say as there are loads of great SIDs stored on the HVSC" (hvsc); a dislike of "hardcore drum 'n bass style music" on the SID — "SID has not been built for awful (what people call) music like this. Of course, it is up to the SID musician themselves :)".
• Closing: thanks to Cronosoft, CSDb "and many other C64 enthusiasts"; "although the C64 is over 22 years old, people are still supporting this great machine".

Practical takeaways#

• Example tunes are how a beginner gets into an editor: Bayliss could not make his own DMC instruments until he had taken the utility disk's examples apart — the same route later tutorials recommend with siddump and goattracker example songs (tracking-workflow).
• A broken packer in a modified editor build (DMC V4.0B) can cost years; keep a known-good version of the tool you release with.
• What a C64-native DMC user asks of a PC tracker: the real chip's sound and a hands-on way to sweep filter cutoff while listening — the reasons some composers stay on the machine (compare sid-wizard's motivation).

Notable quotes#

"I needed to play around with the example tunes before I was able to create my own instruments."

"Goat Tracker lacks the real C64 SID environment … It is not a bad composer though."

Relevance to the wiki#

Creates richard-bayliss; adds a 2006 user's view to goattracker and a data point for the 6581/8580 preference on sid; names DMC V2.0/V4.0/V5.0, Music Assembler, Voicetracker/Music Mixer Module 5 and Future Composer V4 as the editor lineage of a 1990s game musician (future-composer, tracker-scene-history).

Pages touched#

richard-bayliss · goattracker · future-composer · martin-galway · rob-hubbard · sidin

To verify#

• Birth date: "27 years old, will be 28 on Christmas Day" in July 2006 gives 1978-12-25 (arithmetic from the interview, not stated as a date).
• Whether Sub Hunter and Crash Course were released, and who wrote the DMC versions (Graffity/Panic Design is named only for V4.0B) — not in the source.