blog o' sphere

This is part zero of a dissection of my recent JS1K submission Fifteen, a 1K javascript audio demo. In this part: history of the tune.

In August 2004 I wrote an unnamed tune using soundtracker. It got the temporary name "f", because it's in 15/8 time and 15 is 0xf in hex. As was my custom, snapshots got an incrementing version number stuck on the end, and the "final" version was called f4.xm. I never got round to properly naming or distributing it, but it seemed well received by the few friends I showed it to.

Here's the original xm (or rendered in-browser for your convenience).

Fast forward four years to July 2008. My friend Kinetic had just started serious hacking on a project he'd had in mind for a long while, namely modding the Amiga game Lemmings with new levels, graphics and music. Since he liked my tune, I set myself the challenge of squeezing it into the constraints that would allow playback within the game.

Lemmings has a particularly unsophisticated playroutine. Its capabilities are a tiny subset of those of Protracker: the only supported effect is "set volume", although an initial speed can be set. Only three channels are available as the fourth is reserved for sound effects; maximum 15 samples per tune, and no finetunes. In addition, the entire tune had to fit into 47000 bytes―the game ran on a 512K Amiga so memory was tight. Nonetheless, to my (and Kinetic's!) surprise and delight, I succeeded in making something that sounded very much like the original 8-channel tune.

Here's the 3-channel version (browser).¹

And here's a video of it playing in Lemmings.

Fast forward another four years. So JS1K came round and I'd been musing over the idea of submitting something audio-related. Since rule number one of optimization is to have a stable starting point, I needed a tune already written. After my previous success, f4.xm seemed worth trying, although I was under no illusions that it would survive such a drastic excision unscathed.

Next up: so how do you squeeze something like this into 1K?

[1] Alert readers might spot that this file is larger than 47000 bytes. The game's internal file format stored a stream of three-byte (note, sample, volume) tuples with RLE of empty events, making the pattern data smaller than Protracker's encoding. Samples were of course uncompressed to allow Paula to suck them directly out of RAM.