We are Stardust

LukHash, Roy Widding, 2021, on Cyberchip album

Ilove the fact that Christian called me a techie as I'm the least techie person you could find, but the premise of this game intrigued me and I really wanted to give it a try... and that did mean getting technical.

The game is contained as a stand-alone audio track on the music CD, and to play the game you have to extract the file and convert it to a file that's compatible with the Commodore 64. For me, that meant using Audacity, a program I've used many times to make C64-based ringtones for my phone.

That was the easy part, being “simply” a matter of importing the existing .wav file, trimming the warning message from the beginning of

it and then exporting the remaining game data as a new .wav file. I then needed to find something that would convert it to a .tap or .prg file. Such a program was harder to come by than

I'd expected. They tend to be held on very old websites with broken links, but eventually I managed to download the ancient Audiotap and this did exactly what its name suggests (although maybe it should be Audio2Tap).

I then loaded my newly-created We Are Stardust .tap file into WinVICE and... it worked! First time, no less! The sense of achievement I felt when the loading music kicked in and the loading screen started drawing was quite exhilarating, to be honest. And in theory if you output the audio from your computer to a cassette recorder, the resulting “real” tape would work too when loaded in using a real Commodore Datassette. Pressing the fire button to start my first game was much more satisfying than I'd normally expect, but would the game be worth the effort…