Loadstar 237/237.d81/t.chamberlain

Text File | 2004-01-01 | 15.3 KB | 514 lines

u
  C R A I G   C H A M B E R L A I N

    A Transcript of an Impromptu
 Talk Given at the 1999 Chicago EXPO


    Well, geez, thanks everybody for
your interest. I jotted down a few
notes, things to say. I'll try to
make it pretty brief. There'll be a
few controversial statements and a
little history on how SID PLAYER came
about. I'll let you in on the secret
right at first: SID PLAYER was made
by kids. At least that's how I tend
to think of it now.

    I was a college student, a
freshman at the University of
Michigan, and Harry Bratt, who wrote
the interface, was still a high
school student. He wrote the
software, which was tested by other
high school students, so in a way you
could say that SID PLAYER was made by
kids. I'll come back to this thing
about kids at the end of my talk.

    My interest in computer music
came about by listening to music put
out by Walter Carlos, Tamita and
Synergy, the big three that I
discovered. In fact I heard many of
the Bach classical pieces as
electronic versions before I ever
heard them performed by a real
orchestra, so I had sort of an
unusual background. The way I first
got introduced to electronic music
was at Disneyland; they had something
called the Main Street Electrical
Parade, which used synthesizer music
broadcast at nighttime. So for the
SID PLAYER stuff, I consider
Disneyland's Electrical Parade to be
the starting point of it all.

    In fact, the last song Harry did,
and remains unfinished, was the music
from the Main Street Electrical
Parade.

    When I was about 14 or so I was
babysitting for a family and I
noticed that in a back room the
father had this brand new thing,
called an Apple II. He let me use it,
so after the kids had gone to bed, he
and I would play with it. That's
where I learned BASIC and the first
things about computers. He worked for
a company that sold them but instead
I chose to get an Ohio Scientific
computer, in part because it ran at 2
MHz, which was twice as fast as the
Commodore running at 1 MHz.

    With the money I had saved up
from lawn-mowing, delivering
newspapers and babysitting I was able
to buy the computer, which ran around
$1800 in 1980. I had to dip into
money that I had saved for college
but luckily my parents allowed me to
do that. It was a good decision.

    That's where I learned BASIC. The
BASIC that was on the Ohio Scientific
was the very same Microsoft Version 2
BASIC that's on the Commodore 64.

    And now for the controversy part.
My high school bought four of these
Ohio Scientific computers, which was
great for me, but by then I had
learned just about everything I
wanted to about that machine. The new
thing that was out there was the
Atari home computer, and that's what
I bought. That's where I learned
about color and graphics and sound.

    In my opinion, the Atari home
computer was a better-designed
computer than the Commodore 64.

 [Nervous grumblings from the]
[audience...]

    I knew that would get you riled
up. But consider, when they were
designing the Commodore 64 they
didnt't really know what all they
were going to be coming up with. They
took a sound chip that had been in
development for something else; they
took a BASIC language which hadn't
really been enhanced for any special
features for the graphics. This was
great for me because it opened up an
opportunity for me to write a book
that provided graphics utilities.
But in general, they just cobbled a
bunch of things together.

    Unfortunately the Atari company
didn't really know what they had on
their hands, and in my opinion, they
didn't know how to market it. A lot
of people bought the Commodore 64
merely sold on the fact that it had
64K of RAM compared to all the other
computers, which had less. The public
didn't know how to evaluate one
computer against another and they
just went for the number, 64, that
was in the name of the Commodore. I
think that's what sold a lot of them,
initially.

    The Atari had a sound chip in it
called the POKEY chip. It was the
POtentiometer and KEYboard
controller. I wrote a little music
player program for that. The whole
purpose of it was to add Donkey Kong
type music to game programs, so it
would play on the interrupt. This was
called POKEY PLAYER and was published
in SoftSide Magazine. The download
files for that were extremely popular
because they were very small. I had a
way of compressing the data so that
there was less than two bytes needed
per note. In the days of 300 baud
modems the program was very popular
on BBSes.

    Harry Bratt designed that editor
and I designed the file format and
did all the assembly language
programming.

    Around this time, in the mail I
received a disk and letter from a
Robert Huffman and he said how much
he enjoyed using POKEY PLAYER. On the
disk was a song he had done called
Bach's Brandenburg Concerto, No. 5,
First Movement, which blew me away
because I was using the program for
Donkey Kong music and this guy was
using it for Brandenburg Concerto. He
was using a crude editor which only
allowed you to enter one voice at a
time. You have to save a file, load
up another file, and put in another
voice and hope that they all
synchronized at the end.

   His song made me realize that all
this was going to go off in a new
direction. At the end of my Freshman
year at the University of Michigan I
got a call from one Scott Card, who
was the book editor at Compute!
Publications. Later on he went on to
gain fame as the science fiction
author, Orson Scott Card. He wrote
[Ender's Game] and other books and is
still actively writing today.

    He called me up and asked me if I
might write POKEY PLAYER in an
enhanced version to be included in a
book, and at that time Sheldon Leemon
was telling me about the Commodore 64
as being the hot new computer. The
Atari was sort of going down the
tubes. So I talked Orson Scott Card
into doing two books, which became
All About the Commodore 64, Volume 1
and 2. Volume 1 was the tutorial
BASIC and the intention for Volume 2
was to include the graphics and music
tools I had created for the Atari,
converted for the Commodore. POKEY
PLAYER was to become SID PLAYER.

    I had written what is called
"player missile graphics" on the
Atari; what is called sprites on the
C-64. So that's what Volume 2 was all
about -- conversions of the utilities
from the Atari for the C-64. It took
about a year to do all of that so I
took a year off from college to
finish that work.

    When I did the music system for
the Commodore the working name of it
was SID PLAYER. I fully intended to
come up with a better name for it,
but never did...which was a problem
since people call songs created for
SID PLAYER "SID songs", which is what
they also called songs made for other
players.

    I noticed an intersting thing
that happened around this time. In
All About the Commodore 64 Volume 2
there were two programs: one was a
sprite control system and the other
was some bitmap graphics routines for
doing fills and other stuff. These
provided statements you would put
into a program you were writing. And
then there was SID EDITOR, where you
didn't have to do any programming;
you just had to put in the music.

    Right around this time is when we
saw a transition in the Commodore
community from one of being
hobbyists, to one of being users.
Hobbyists would like to write
programs and get the magazines and
type in the programs, learning how to
program. Users would not be
interested in programming, but would
just want to load a program and use
it. SID EDITOR was one of the first
"user" programs.

    I think the whole computing world
made this transition from being
mainly hobbyists to being users at
this time. Obviously, today most
people are not interested in
programming, but only interested in
using computers.

    Because the SID PLAYER took off
so well, I did a new version called
ENHANCED SID PLAYER, which was in
part my opportunity to get rid of
some frustrations with the editor
written in BASIC. Harry had done a
great job but it was in BASIC and
very slow. So I rewrote the whole
thing in 35K of assembly language,
which I'm glad to have done.

    The new SID PLAYER was sold as a
book and disk combination and
Compute! tried to sell it in its
regular channels, the bookstores,
and at that time the bookstores
didn't know what to do with a book
that had a disk with it! It was one
of the first to do that, so they
chose not to carry it. I maintain
that if Compute! had sold it in a box
to be sold in computer stores, it
would have sold much, much better.
But as it was, the final book and SID
PLAYER really didn't sell.

    You've all heard about the SID
SYMPHONY Stereo Cartridge. I received
a letter from one Kent Sullivan who's
a student at Purdue University,
looking to add SID PLAYER music to an
adventure system. He had the idea of
taking a second SID chip and putting
it in a cartridge. He had a friend
build the circuit board from his
design. I got together with them and
with the help of a couple of other
friends we made the first run of SID
Stereo Cartridges.

    There was another one of Kent's
friends, a tall guy with blond hair
who like to go by the name of Dr.
Evil. That's where we got the name
Dr. Evil Laboratories, a name which
probably scared off a few people
purchasing through mail order. But I
hear the cartridges are still working
and that's good.

    The next big thing that happened
for SID music was QuantumLink. I had
been active on the Delphi service
initially -- that's where the very
first SID songs were posted. They
were also posted on CompuServe by
other people. Delphi never knew how
to promote their service apparently
so they never caught on, although I
did try to give it my best shot with
the SID PLAYER support.

    But QuantumLink is what really
took off and they went on to develop
a feature where you could play SID
music while you were online. So you
could be in a chat room and a DJ
could call up and start playing a
song. It did bother me that, although
to their credit, Sysops would tell
you if you asked them how you
could go on and make that music,
QLink never themselves, and in their
monthly magazine that they sent out,
never mentioned which music system it
was and where you could go to get
that great music. They just presented
it as a great feature of QuantumLink.

    I had just signed on to Quantum
Link and one of the programmers who
had added SID PLAYER was a bit
impatient in wanting to know what I
thought of it. I was being bombarded
with messages from all sorts of people
and apparently I didn't respond to him
quite quickly enough. So the next
thing I get is an instant message with
all sorts of expletives, all about
"this Craig guy -- who does he think
he is..." and all sorts of haughty
stuff. He had mistyped the TO person
and directed it to me instead of
somebody else.

    I realized I didn't need to put
up with this kind of abuse, and with
all the other things going on, I sort
of turned my back on the whole
computer scene and went back to
college. I am very pleased that
people are still using the SID PLAYER
and are getting some enjoyment from
it.

    I'm a little perplexed that the
Europeans [hate] SID PLAYER. They are
championing Rob Hubbard's music. I
[like] the music of Rob Hubbard. It's
great stuff. I love to listen to that
music. I harbor no ill well toward
the European crowd at all, but many
of them are very much against the SID
PLAYER. They see it as an American
thing and apparently a lot of the
songs they heard weren't of very good
quality.

    Well, when you consider that Rob
Hubbard's system was never released
so you had people who were being paid
by companies to make game music, and
of course that's going to sound very
good. It's professionally composed.
Whereas all the SID music was being
composed by just hobbyists! Some of
it great; some of it not so great.
You have to look for the gems.

    I see it as a apples and oranges
thing. It's unfortunate that so many
Europeans take this attitude because
there is a lot of good SID music out
there.

    One other thing I'm pleased with
is that, to my knowledge, with the
Enhanced SID EDITOR, there is only
one bug. On the screen which displays
the correct values for all your
different settings, there's one place
where, instead of showing a signed
integer, it displays it as unsigned.
So instead of showing negative 1, it
shows 255. That's the only bug, to my
knowledge.

    I'm glad it got out there with
just one bug; it's too bad that
software that's put out today, by
Microsoft and others, cannot make a
similar claim.

 [Grunts of agreement from the]
[audience.]

    Someone who recently visited the
web page I made for SID PLAYER made
an interesting point: making music
with the PC and MIDI is just not the
same as what they can do with SID
EDITOR. What they miss is the ability
to control the sounds, to shape their
own individual sounds. With MIDI
they're stuck with the basic piano,
or gong or whatever. They like
getting in there with that control.
I designed the file formats on the
Atari and 64, having notes with
commands to change the sound
interspersed between them, with this
feature in mind and I'm glad that
people appreciate that.

    These days I'm doing Unix system
programming and I play around with
Visual BASIC and stuff. I am not
active in the Commodore community and
I don't intend to do any more
versions. People have asked me about
that, and if I didn't have to work
for a living, there are features I'd
love to go back and put in.

    I mentioned at the beginning that
SID PLAYER was made by kids. When I
was a teenager and was learning
BASIC, there were programs that were
traded around user groups and
published in magazine, and they were
written in BASIC. These were good
enough programs to use so you used
them, but because they were written
in BASIC, the source code came with
them. You could understand how the
program worked and this was your
gateway into becoming a programmer.

    BASIC was a simple enough
language to learn so a person who was
new to computers could do it. But an
article I recently read in WIRED made
me realize that today it's quite a
bit harder for kids, or for anyone
really, to get into programming. You
don't have the programs being
circulated where you have the source
code in a simple enough language that
you can understand by reading it.

    So although we've had incredible
technological advances, in the
process we have lost something. I
wonder how people are learning
programming today? One of the best
ways to learn is by doing a lot of it
-- that's how I learned when I was in
high school -- and I see it being
harder today. C language is a pretty
tough language for some to start out
on. You have to understand too many
things about memory. Even Visual
BASIC is not as easy as typing in

 10 print"something"
 20 goto10

 and typing RUN, and saying "Oh yes,
that's a loop. Now how do I make it
stop."

    I care a lot about education and
I wish we didn't have to give up this
easier way we had in the past to
learn programming.


 [NOTE:] To see Craig's SID PLAYER web
site, go to Yahoo and search for
"sidplayer".

 [DAVE'S AFTERTHOUGHT:] Craig is right
about the loss of an easy way to learn
programming. One has to go to school,
grapple with C or C++, get various
Certifications, etc, etc. Making
computers do their stuff has become a
"priesthood!"

 Which is why LOADSTAR is still here!
I believe computers are the greatest
[toy] ever created, and programming
them is the best [game] ever invented.
Anyone who is rather logical [and]
creative should have access to this
unique, whole-brain hobby.

 DMM