CVGM.net Computer & Video Game Music

From Linus' Website:

A "bastard pop" track consists of two different pieces of music, by two competing or quarreling artists, played back at the same time.

In the world of SID music, the two most well-known composers are Rob Hubbard and Martin Galway. Here's a bastard pop mix of their celebrated tunes Lightforce and Parallax:

This track was refused at remix.kwed.org, because it was "a big confusion to the head". Judge for yourself! =)

In order to create this mix, I had to adjust the tempo of both tracks, and then re-tune one of them to fit the key of the other. Changing the tempo was easy; since SID files contain 6502 machine code, all I had to do was locate the initialization subroutine of each tune, and add a few assembly language instructions to set up the CIA timer registers.

Then I had to re-tune one of the songs, and it ended up being Parallax. Luckily, the playroutine relied upon a frequency table that was rather easy to locate within the SID file. I wrote a program that would read the table from the file, multiply each value with a tuning factor, and then write the new table back to the file. Finding the correct tuning factor was a matter of trial-and-error.

The drums were generated using a home-brewn beat box program and the timidity MIDI sequencer.