Every computer nerd I know has their own fav music they listen to when making games or programming in general.
For me, I have always had a love for 8/16 bit music from the C64 and Amiga. Music I listen to most often are SID Chip C64 tracks. Many are from games and a few from the demo scene.
As I have an 86inch TV on the wall next to my desk, I decided to put together a playlist of some of the tracks I listen the most and added some game play to make it a bit more visually appealing.
The playlist contains the following:
- Commando.
- Master of Magic.
- The Last V8.
- Game Killer Cartridge.
- Knucklebusters.
- Lightforce.
- Sanxion.
- Warhawk.
- Delta.
- Mega Apocalypse.
- Nemesis the Warlock.
- Zoolook from Chain Reaction.
The games I loved to play the most from this list are: Commando, Lightforce, Sanxion, Warhawk, Delta and Mega Apocalypse.
A quick fact: In 1987 I, Andie and Gairy met up with Ash & Dave at a computer show in London and we went and had a chat with Simon Nichol who created Mega Apocalypse. He was really nice, and we discussed the technical side of the game. As Gairy had already disassembled the game and looked at the code, he quizzed Simon on why the game was glitchy and the use of non-maskable interrupts? Simon’s response was it was due to time pressures and he had a skiing holiday booked. Having programmed the C64 and looking at Simons game, I would think there was not enough raster interrupt time available and pushing some tasks to the NMI was a must. With the raster interrupt you can specify a point on the screen to stop and take some actions like when at the bottom of the screen, update sprite positions and redraw them. This avoids any kind of glitching on screen. With NMI, it runs when it does and any graphic updates would show a visible screen glitch like you could see on the first PC games.
