VGMPF wiki: Soundmonitor, TFMX Editor (C64) and The Great Giana Sisters (C64)

Three VGMPF pages that together describe the editors chris-huelsbeck used on the C64 and what happened to the great-giana-sisters music between editor and game.

Key claims#

Soundmonitor

• "The most popular Commodore 64 music editor in Europe of the late 1980s, programmed by Chris Hülsbeck (then an 18-years old hobbyist)"; VGMPF gives a release date of 1986-09-19 (the magazine issue is 10/1986 — s-64er-soundmonitor-article).
• Model: "All bars are entered separately and linked to each other in a track/step table: on every row (step), you set a tempo, length, volume, fade-out speed; in each cell (SID channel in a step), a bar, transpose, instrument set; and on every single note, an instrument and whether to disable transpose and enable portamento and arpeggio." Bars can be recorded from the keyboard with quantization. Requires knowledge of hex and C64 memory.
• The built-in driver Musicmaster "was made for use in games and supported almost all known effects at the time: transpose, detune, portamento, vibrato, pulse width modulation, filter modulation, and arpeggios (a first in an editor)". Hülsbeck later made The Final Musicplayer, optimised, with improved waveforms and sample support.
• The scene added samples, "most famously Rockmonitor from April 1987 (to Hülsbeck's chagrin at the time). However, the sound grew old, as many arrangers used the same instruments; particularly drums were just a triangle wave sliding down. Songs were always over 10 KB, and the driver was slow and unrelocatable, leading several programmers to modify the driver and compress songs."
• "Throughout 1987, Hülsbeck added better waveform changes, samples, an optimized driver called The Final Musicplayer, and sound effects, but gave it only to Georg Brandt. Over the years, composers learned programming their own drivers, and more modern editors arrived."
• Composers who used Soundmonitor on at least one game: Appaloosa Interactive, Charles Callet, Chris Hülsbeck, Georg Brandt, Hannes Seifert, matt-gray, Pablo Toledo, Peter Clarke, Ramiro Vaca; who used it before scoring games: Barry Leitch, Jason Page, jeroen-tel, Jonathan Dunn.

TFMX Editor (C64) — unreleased

• In June 1988 Hülsbeck was still using Soundmonitor with samples; that summer "he noticed that the new 8580 revision of the SID chip played samples too quietly and decided to improve on the analog SID sounds instead. As part of that, he wrote a new driver which used a script language in addition to the typical rigid instrument table."
• First used on Starball (August 1988, released December); first release Garrison (September 1988, scored by Ramiro Vaca); two bugfixes late 1988 / early 1989. Only Hülsbeck and Vaca had the editor.
• The demoscene made its own editors for the format in 1989–90: Mastercomposer V1.0 (not the 1983 Master Composer) and then Timecomposer V4.0. Hülsbeck "has thought about releasing TFMX Editor, but prefers finding time to write a proper manual over spending time on support"; two video interviews show screenshots of his demo song Time (September/October 1988).

The Great Giana Sisters (C64) — Rainbow Arts / Time Warp, released 1988-01

• "Chris Hülsbeck composed in his Soundmonitor, and converted the 7 main songs and 15 sound effects to The Final Musicplayer, which takes over 4 KB less and, for the first time, can play a sound effect over 3 channels of music."
• Voted 25th favourite SID by the HVSC crew and fans. Songs: Title, Main Menu (2:26), Get Ready (0:05), In-Game (1:48), Castle (2:11), End of Round (0:13), Greatest (1:33), Unused (0:47).
• Chip notes: "The bass of all songs and the melody of Castle sound different on every 6581 because it uses SID's infamous filter. On the 8580 revision, the percussion of Title is quiet" (sid).

Practical takeaways#

• Soundmonitor's per-step tempo/length/volume/fade, per-cell bar/transpose/instrument-set and per-note options describe exactly the three levels — orderlist, pattern, note — that later trackers formalised (orderlist, tracker).
• "Script language beside the rigid instrument table" (1988) is the same step sid-wizard-era editors take with their wave/pulse/filter tables versus fixed instrument bytes (instrument-tables).
• Giana Sisters is a concrete case of the "editor driver vs. game driver" split: compose in the editor, ship in a smaller player that can also play sound effects across all three channels (sid-player-routine).

Relevance to the wiki#

Fills soundmonitor (model, Musicmaster effect list, variants), creates tfmx and great-giana-sisters, and adds the 8580-samples fact to chip-samples and sid.

Pages touched#

soundmonitor · tfmx · great-giana-sisters · chris-huelsbeck · chip-samples · sid · sid-player-routine · instrument-tables · orderlist · tracker