Legacy of the AncientsDuring the years of the mid-1980s, My friends John and Charles Dougherty, as Quest Software, brought me in to help them with their game Legacy of the Ancients.There is a decent bit of backround on the game on the Wikipedia Page. My contribution was the writing of the theme music as well as the 6502 assembly language code to play it, the sound design and coding for the various sounds that were used in the game as well as some games within the game. (I was particularly proud of the "Liar's Dice" game I wrote that would actually learn and adjust to the player.) I may include more here, but for now, there is this:
Legacy of the Ancients MarchThis is an mp3 of a WAV file captured using the VICE C-64 emulator, version 1.21, running on a Linux workstation (Fedora Core 4). This sounds to my ears to be a very accurate emulation of the output of the SID chip, minus the rather noticeable machine noise that would be part of any recording directly from a Commodore computer (which I could do - I still use a C-128, nearly daily.) I later ported this music to the Apple II version of the game, which was a challenge: the Apple II used a single bit for sound generation. Let's just say, the three part harmony was not so clear.
Legacy
of the Ancients, Apple ][As noted above, the Apple ][ family used a single bit that could be turned on and off by accessing a specific address. This is played by an assembly language program that I wrote. There is no interrupt structure on the Apple ][, so the program just ran continuously in a loop until time to change state of that bit again. Just because we could, the delay cycle was replaced by a call I made to some code that Chuck (or John?) wrote, that animated the flags on the castle that was on the screen while this played. This recording was salvaged off a cassette - it has added reverb, which probably makes ia bit more listenable, but a little less authentic.
Last updated:May 2008 |