SIDin #11 — Laxity interview (Stefano Tognon, 2007)

laxity (Thomas Egeskov Petersen) of Vibrants and maniacs-of-noise, "a old composer … He recently started to compose again with sid", interviewed by mail in January 2007 — about the ten C64 sound drivers he has written, why he writes them, and the tracker he had just released, SID Factory (the ancestor of sid-factory-ii).

Key claims#

• Who: 33 in January 2007, married, two children, near Aarhus, Denmark; a game programmer since 2001 (hired to program a Game Boy Advance game), then PC/Xbox, GameCube and "presently mobile phones (Java.. yak!)".
• Learning on Hubbard's player: "relatively difficult, but not an experience that taught me coding but merely a basic understanding of how pointers work" — figuring out "where pointers were read, parsed and so on" by trial and error; "The most difficult was actually making the music" (rob-hubbard, hubbard-player).
• Why write 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" — "not saying that those who 'only' use tools by other people aren't doing it right".
• Ten C64 sound drivers in his source files: four in 1987–91 (three used publicly), the rest after 2005 — the JCH player ("which took a long time to do"), three for SID Factory, and two for "the Tiny Sid Competition Challenge last year (2005)" (tiny-sid-compo). Since 1991 also drivers for the Amiga, Game Boy, PC and Game Boy Advance, all but the PC one inheriting "a lot of structure and idea" from the C64 drivers; the GBA driver "probably the most complex of them all, and done in a hurry while I programmed my first game" (sid-player-routine).
• SID Factory: his first tracker, motivated while writing the driver for the JCH editor — "SID Factory … takes off in the JCH Editor platform — and the idea was to take it a bit further": an elaborated driver/editor integration protocol, and tracks with a separate instrument column and command column "instead of just one unified one", so "I can create table setups defined in the drivers, instead of having to write a driver that uses tables as defined in the editor" (tracker).
• Plans: a spare-time project. After version 0.5 the CSDb comments asked for a STOP command in tracks, multiple-tune support ("a bitch to do, but I will eventually have to do it"), and editing conveniences — press a key on a pointer to jump the cursor to the table row it points to, which he plans to extend to commands that point into the wave table, "all without structural changes to the driver/editor integration". A version 0.6 with changes to the driver/editor integration existed unreleased in January 2007.
• Speech synthesis with SID voices: "interesting, but not a thing I have any experience at all".
• Real vs emulator: the real thing "since it's the real thing". 6581 vs 8580: he uses the 6581, but listens to each tune on the chip it was written for (sid).
• Worst own tunes: conversions — James Bond, The Pink Panther, I Wanna Dance with Somebody — "that suck big-time".
• Favourite composers: Hein Holt ("doesn't do that much mainstream stuff"), Goto80 ("really good with rhythm and sound design"), aleksi-eeben ("also alternative - a brilliant guy", met over Game Boy Color, GBA and C64 work); classics: rob-hubbard ("all time favourite"), martin-galway, fred-gray.
• Best SIDs (no order): Master of Magic, Wiz, Crazy Comets (Hubbard); The Way of the Exploding Fist (Neil Brennan, spelt "Niel"); Myth Demo (johannes-bjerregaard); Daley Thompson's Decathlon (Galway and David Dunn); Body Slam tune 4 and Ghouls'n Ghosts tune 1 (Tim Follin); Legend of Kage and Implosion tune 1 (Fred Gray, spelt "Grey").

Practical takeaways#

• The design decision behind SID Factory and SID Factory II: the driver defines the tables, the editor is generic — the opposite of GoatTracker's fixed table model. It is why SF2 ships several drivers with different instrument layouts (sid-factory-ii, instrument-tables).
• Reading someone else's player to learn it ("where pointers were read, parsed") is how the 1987 generation started; the hard part was the music, not the code.
• A portable driver architecture: the same structure served the C64, Amiga, Game Boy and GBA drivers.

Notable quotes#

"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."

"I can create table setups defined in the drivers, instead of having to write a driver that uses tables as defined in the editor."

Relevance to the wiki#

First-hand facts for laxity (age, job, driver count, platforms, taste); the origin and design principle of SID Factory for sid-factory-ii; his relation to the JCH editor; a Vibrants/MoN member's 2007 status for maniacs-of-noise.

Pages touched#

laxity · sid-factory-ii · maniacs-of-noise · tiny-sid-compo · rob-hubbard · martin-galway · fred-gray · johannes-bjerregaard · aleksi-eeben · sidin

To verify#

• "the Tiny Sid Competition Challenge last year (2005)": the interview was done in January 2007, so "last year" would be 2006 (Tiny Sid 2); the bracketed 2005 is the first compo. Which compo his two drivers were for is therefore ambiguous.
• Version 0.5 of SID Factory was on CSDb before January 2007; the release date is not given here (SIDId lists SidFactory/Laxity as 2006 — s-sidid-player-list).