It’s obviously a week for awesome arcade gamage My brother-in-law Hamez is currently staying with us while he’s back here visiting from interstate, and last night after some subtle suggestions from yours truly, we jumped onto the arcade cab for some awesomeness. This time it was Capcom’s seminal scrolling beat’em’up Final Fight
While I remember playing this one at the arcades, I have probably clocked up more hours playing the amazing Mega CD port back in the 16-bit era. Because of the difficulty and the continues/lives system, I never managed to finish the game beffore, so it was nice to be able to finish the arcade version and see the ending to the game We were actually doing pretty well as far as continues go at the start of the game, but by the time we got to the end, the Free Play setting really came in handy
Anywho, I only started taking pics when we got to the end of the last level – the gallery’s below in all its wonky glory since I was trying to play and take photos at the same time For those interested, I’m taking up the 2P slot as Guy, whilst Hamez spent the latter half of the game playing as Haggar, doing the grab-jump-piledrive technique over and over again. Because it’s awesome
Just worked out that the images weren’t displaying their captions or were formatting/aligning themselves correctly following a recent update to the system – I’ve gone in and made the changes now, so it looks like it’s back to normal Apologies for any weirdness with the formatting in the interim!
I was doing some stuff on the PC I have setup in the back room yesterday, and since it was pretty mundane and took a while, I thought I’d have a crack at playing something on my Sega Astro City cab between processing tasks. Since Street Fighter 2 Championship Edition was in there, I thought I might as well give it a crack, and ended up finishing it! I’ve never done that on an arcade version of the game before (probably because I always ran out of credits or I was too busy playing vs another person), so it was pretty cool I mean, the ending was pretty lame, but in a fun kind of way (if that makes sense!).
Funnily enough, I didn’t have much in the way of problems in beating the four bosses (Bison excepted – took a few goes to get that one), but got stuck on Honda and… possibly Guile. I’m hardly the world’s best player at the game, but I’m not too shabby either – with Honda, I couldn’t jump in to attack because he always got me with his standing fierce chopping strike thingo and was having trouble mixing up distances to avoid a few basic traps, and while I got close to beating Guile, always seemed to loose it towards the end.
So I cheated by queuing up the problem characters as player 2, beat them, then continued in single player mode – after you beat the character as 2P, you don’t have to beat them in the actual game itself. That’s a handy hint I remember from when I used to play it at the arcades, though I was normally so cheap I wouldn’t pay for someone else, just hoped that another player would drop by and pick a character I had trouble beating
Anywho, enjoy the shaky cam photos below – I was trying to snap photos as fast as possible without dying or missing anything, hence the wonky shots of the ending dialogue… though to be honest, I don’t think there’s too much there worth writing home about
Oh, and I reckon I need to pick up a fresh spring for the Sanwa stick on player 2 on the Astro City, it’s feeling a bit too loose and isn’t as tight as P1’s. The clips for the P2 start button are also wonky, so I might need to grab some fresh quick-connects and rewire them. I have to get some proper Sanwa-standard quick-connects for the extra Neo Geo wiring on my JAMMA harness anyways (I’m using some generic quick-connects on them at the moment, and they often come off in-game ), so it might be convenient to grab a handful of those, some fresh springs and snag a new PSU and degausing wand at the same time if budget alows for it. Will add it to the “to-get” list
Here’s something a little different – nearly half-way through last year, I thought I’d finally do something I’d been wanting to do for years and years, ever since I stumbled across the C64 Back in Time remixes when they first hit the internet.
One of the tunes on the C64 I absolutely loved was the theme song Chris Hülsbeck did for the R-Type port on the C64 – it started off as this cool bass-line and drum combo and then adds a touch of synth and melody to spice things up before breaking momentarily… and then BAM — he goes into this awesome synth chorus, then rolls it back into the previous melody, rinses and repeats with alternative basslines, breaks again, goes into different variations… just amazing, amazing stuff – complex, stunning, beautiful arrangements on such a humble home computer. For those unawares or maybe just want to take a trip back in time, here’s a clip from YouTube of the C64 title screen running a complete loop of the song:
Anywho, going back to the original story before I got distracted – I wanted to do a cool remix of the opening song. Unfortunately, for some reason I really, really struggle with working on audio sequencing and loop-creation programs. I got my head around a reasonable amount of bog-standard MIDI-sequencing when I was in high school and played around with a basic loops and sequencers (like the early eJay series of stuff, specifically Rave eJay), but as soon as I wanted to get into anything more complex, I always struggled to achieve anything! The best I got was mixing stuff on ReBirth on the fly, because I struggled making anything remotely awesome when I tried to build up patterns myself, I used to always get confused Then I tried messing around on a demo of Fruity Loops, and I had no idea where to even start I kinda gave up after that.
So, I finally decided that I’d have a crack anyway – the end result takes a lot of the original SID elements because I absolutely loved them and wanted to preserve them, but I wrapped them around some more contemporary progressive trance bass lines. I made a few drum loops as well, but I still think they could sound a bit more interesting The end result is still in beta, as there are things I’d like to tighten up – the original export file I created was actually lacking volume and bass, and since I couldn’t be bothered opening up the program, I took the file into Goldwave and worked on the volume and selectively equalised the sound to make it sound a lot beefier than the standard export file I created. There’s a little clipping at the end of the track, and some of the SID sampling needs work, but hey, it’s a beta, and it’s been sitting around on my PC for over 12 months and the only audience have been Wifey and members of my family, so I thought I’d put this one out into the wild. Feel free to leave comments if you’re interested, though I’ve noticed this blog’s not getting too much traffic, which is nice because I don’t the streaming audio to take out my bandwidth You might need to turn up the volume a bit as well – I tried maximising the volume further, but it kept on clipping
Note that the various samples are copyright of their respective owners, this is just a little remix I’ve put together for a bit of fun
Aside from the irregular (but entertaining) Retronauts podcast from 1up, I’ve been getting into some C64-themed podcasts over the last couple of months. The one I’ve been listening to the most would be the C64 Take-away (http://c64takeaway.com/), a great podcast hosted by the very enthusiastic Jan (and occasional host Makke). Based in Copenhagen, the boys do a brill job hosting the show, which features original and classic SID tunes as well as plenty of awesome remixes of classic SID tunes from the C64. I first got into the whole C64 remixing stuff when the first “Back in time” C64 remix soundtrack hit the internet. Gotta love the C64 love out there Funnily enough, the latest episode I think had some feedback from another fellow Aussie, which was really cool — glad to know I’m not the only one down here following their show!
After listening to a couple of episodes, I started wandering around looking for some similar stuff, though I was leaning more towards just the SID chiptunes side of things, regardless of whether they were from games or original SID compositions. I haven’t had a stack of luck finding good podcasts (though because I’m an idiot, I didn’t bother looking around the links posted on the C64 Take-away blog, which I only looked at while I was preparing this post!), but I thought I’d share some of the nerd love I’ve found out there… all two of them
I snagged a random episode off the 8bit Mayhem website (http://8bitmayhem.untergrund.net/), and I was hooked!! Ended up grabbing their entire back-catalogue of episodes There’s no hosting or talking between episodes here, nothing but pure SID goodness. Unfortunately it hasn’t been updated in nearly 12 months, but the back-catalogue is extensive and worthwhile looking into. I’ve got the whole lot sitting on my PC and have really enjoyed them.
Since then, haven’t stumbled onto too much, but I found an excellent SID-related episode over at Hardread’s website (http://hdpodcast.blogspot.com/) – episode 36 was a C64 SID-only special, and it is absolutely amazing (I’m listening to it as I’m typing this post up). If you’re keen to checkout that episode in particular, their page is here. The rest of their gear is chiptunes and demoscene music – if I got into the Amiga when I was younger I’d probably be all over it, but we never upgraded from the C64 until we got our first PC, a 386DX-40, so the C64 was our all-purpose PC until then
I don’t know what it is about C64 music made on the SID audio chip – it’s just so awesome. It of course helps that the C64 was absolutely massive in Europe during the 80s and 90s, and Europe being the epicenter of dance music in all its various flavours, has meant it wasn’t just blips and blaps coming out of that chip, it was crazy melodies and awesome synth brilliance. My love of chiptunes, game music and dance music on the whole can probably be linked all the way back to all the brilliant music on the C64, whether it be in-game stuff or the awesome demoscene music that cropped up everywhere.
… might have to go and play the C64 after I’ve finished these posts up – I’ve got one more to go before I finish up!
So I was listening to the most recent podcast from C64 Take-away on the way home from work this week, and found out about an amazing project that’s been happening for the last couple of years – Stone Oakvalley’s Authentic SID Collection (SOASC=), a project where some very talented C64 fans have converted all the songs from The High Voltage SID Collection into MP3 for easy, portable listening!!! According to the SOASC= website (http://www.6581-8580.com/), that’s 154473 files of music recorded from real C64s (encompassing the various chipset revisions 6581R2, 6581R4 & 8580R5). Every song from the HVSC has been recorded on all three of those revisions to ensure nobody misses out on the nostalgia trip…
This is crazy awesome news, as I’ve been doing some SID – MP3 conversion on and off, but only through PC emulator stuff. So the prospect of having so much awesome available for throwing into my iPod playlist is supremely awesome.
The only bummer is that it’s currently offline, though a note on their download page promises there might be an update on this at the end of the month. I can assure you I’ll be there
So I had an hour to kill the other night and thought I’d get out the C64 and the 1541 and have a proper crack at the ECP games pack I got when I snagged the C64 earlier on this year.
I started out by giving Black Knight a whirl (I died lots ), then moved onto Road Duels (awesome fun!), flipped the disk and fired up Metron (I forgot how to blow up the pac-man space ship thingies ), changed disks and gave Alien Kill a whirl (the aliens look like bugs ), didn’t have much luck with the other two games on Side A of that disk, so I flipped it and jumped onto P.R.O.B.E (couldn’t get past the second screen ) and finished up with Not More Martians!
Since I was on a roll, I also fired up GeOS to see if any of it was familiar, as I remember messing around with the word processor on it and watching my older brother use it for school work and stuff (we had a dot-matrix printer that attached to the C64 — I remember we had heaps of trouble getting the thing to print to it, but on the up-side, it had a standard LPT port so it continued to live on when we migrated to our 386DX-40 many years later). Anywho, booted it up, and it resembled the interface from Windows 3.1, and I reckon I remember seeing an early Mac OS years and years ago and it looked similar to that too! Either that or I’m going crazy Having a pretty good understanding of how modern OS’ work from a user point of view, it’s interesting to go back and see how the C64 could be operated with a GUI, despite the fact I only used to use it from the command line. Oh, and geoPaint was cool
Once all that was up, I figured I needed to end the session on a much more fun note, so I grabbed the tape drive and fired up International Karate for a quick round.
Was another awesome trip down memory lane For those enjoying the C64 stuff, I’ve still got a couple of posts to finish up before I move on to some other stuff I’ve been listening to some C64-related podcasts of late I want to link back to (I’m secretly hoping there’s an awesome repository of awesome SID-related podcasts I’ve yet to uncover besides the great C64 Takeaway and… a few other ones I can’t remember – they’re in my iTunes somewhere ), probably some other random stuff too
Awesome news, the new serial cable I ordered from Chaoticjelly Games a few weeks ago arrived in the post last week, and unlike the serial cable I built myself about a month ago, this one actually worked
So, to take a stroll down memory lane, out came the ECP pack again!
So I plonked it in, gave it a whirl, and got a reaction from the Excelerator Plus 1541 clone drive:
I didn’t spend too much time gaming as I was giving it a quick go before being a responsible husband and started cooking dinner for Wifey and I. However, I did get the chance to give Alien Kill 2 and Robotech a whirl – see below for the full story in image format! As always, click any of the thumbnails for the full version and random commentary.
Cool, I’ve sorted out most of the stuff I wanted to get online before I launched this blog – I’ve still got a couple of retrospective posts to cover a recent playthrough of Shining the Holy Ark on the Saturn (hint: it’s still awesome) and I’ve started playing through Secret of Evermore on the SNES and I’m just over half way through it, so I want to post some ramblings on that, too
Oh, and some arcade stuff too probably wouldn’t hurt – I’ve got enough content there for an awesome changelog of useful tweaks, stupid DIY (it involved electricity ) and general stuff too!
Found an ad in the paper from someone looking at offloading their C64 complete with all sorts of stuff a while back – luckily I got in at the time it was advertised, drove up to their place and came away with a stack of gear! Plenty of edutainment cassettes, some disks, software, original C64 tape drive (never had one of those for our C64 when we were kids, we only had the 1541 Commodore-brand disk drive) and a 3rd party 1541 clone disk drive (the kind that speeds up disk reading and stuff). The only bummer is that there wasn’t a cable for the disk drive, so I’ve finally (as of last week) ordered a replacement one off eBay in the UK. Can’t wait
My brother-in-law Hamez is currently staying with us while he’s back here visiting from interstate, and last night after some subtle suggestions from yours truly, we jumped onto the arcade cab for some awesomeness. This time it was Capcom’s seminal scrolling beat’em’up Final Fight 
For those interested, I’m taking up the 2P slot as Guy, whilst Hamez spent the latter half of the game playing as Haggar, doing the grab-jump-piledrive technique over and over again. Because it’s awesome 
