Trackers & Demoscene
The first ever tracker for the Atari VCS, and just in the nick of time
If the sound of the C64’s SID chip has become too passé, and yet you still find yourself famished for all things retro, then allow us to draw your attention towards TIATracker, the first ever tracker for the Atari VCS. And not before time.
Some of you will fondly remember the VCS (or 2600, as it later became known),
“You can now harness the Atari VCS’s musical chops right from your Windows PC”
which was released a mere 39 years ago, and is notable for its red-buttoned joystick and the ill-fated title ET The Extra-Terrestrial, largely responsible for the video game crash of 1983.
Up until now, the best composing tools available for the Atari VCS involved either copying and converting individual music patterns one at a time or editing your music in a text file before compiling to cartridge. Previously, bands such as 8 Bit Weapon and Tree Wave have exploited the VCS’s two distinctive-sounding TIA channels via a custom cartridge, but thanks to TIATracker, you can now harness the machine’s musical chops right from your Windows PC. Have a little look-see at bit.ly/TIATracker.
DEMO OF THE MONTH
Chiperia Issue #5 by The Chiperia Project Modern ‘musicdisks’ take their genre name from a time when demos were distributed on floppy disk, but in the case of The Chiperia Project’s latest, downloaded from Pouet as an Amiga ‘ADF’ disk image file, the umbrella is still very fitting. A collection of well over a dozen four-channel SID-inspired chip tunes, Chiperia Issue #5 is well worth a listen. Watch it on YouTube or emulate it on your computer or Android device at bit.ly/Chiperia5.