 This music demo is for the game Brilliant Maze by Geir Straume and was written for the 16K RGCD Game Competition which was closed at midnight of the 7th/8th of December 2014. The music player was written a few months beforehand by Odie to run in as little raster time as possible for Hammer Down (another upcoming Cosine project), but was then enhanced with conditional assembly flags to be able to switch on/off more advanced music player techniques at the cost of more raster time. After the music player was finished, the old sound effect player which was originally written back in 1998 and has undergone several revisions was then incorporated to work along with the music player.
The first 4 tunes in this demo use all 3 SID channels and the demo will block playing the in-game sound effects at the same time. Tunes 5-8 only use channels 1 and 2 of the SID, leaving channel 3 to run the effects without disturbing the music. Also, the music before packing used a little over 5K and the unpacked game was around 21K (with 20 levels), but after packing, the game came down to 16K quite easily. The music player only has octave 0 defined in it's frequency table and this is expanded with a 22-byte routine to fill the remaining octaves when the music player is initialized which helps with the packing side too, good for tight space restrictions. |
