15 Years of Scene Spirit

Here's a C64 musicdisk containing 18 SID tunes that I've released in various demoscene competitions over the years. The collection is simultaneously released as an album on Spotify and other streaming services.

Making an album was a surprisingly enjoyable experience. Besides picking a good set of songs and fretting over the best order in which to play them, it involved adjusting the master volume of each track and the length of the gaps between them. The volume adjustment was achieved by patching the playroutines in all the places where the global volume register is written, and storing the value into RAM instead. After the playroutine returns, the value is retrieved, adjusted, and written to the register.

A few of the songs (marked v2) were updated or even remade from scratch for this compilation. You'll find more information about that in the scrolltexts.

To play this musicdisk on real hardware, you need a PAL C64 with a model 8580 SID chip. But for your convenience I've already made a recording from such a machine, and applied some subtle mastering and stereo-widening. The result has been uploaded to YouTube (above) and various streaming services including Spotify, Apple Music, and iTunes.

The album cover features 25x25 PETSCII characters underneath some white text. The text overlay is rendered with sprites on the C64, while a high-resolution version was created for the streaming services.

Download

• lft-15-years-of-scene-spirit.d64 (Musicdisk, 170.8 kB)
• lft-15-years-of-scene-spirit-sid-files.zip (SID files, 78.3 kB)
• Linus Akesson - 15 Years of Scene Spirit - mp3.zip (MP3 files, 111.1 MB)

This musicdisk has a CSDb page.