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  C R A I G   C H A M B E R L A I N

    A Transcript of an Impromptu
 Talk Given at the 1999 Chicago EXPO


    Well, geez, thanks everybody for
your interest. I jotted down a few
notes, things to say. I'll try to
make it pretty brief. There'll be a
few controversial statements and a
little history on how SID PLAYER came
about. I'll let you in on the secret
right at first: SID PLAYER was made
by kids. At least that's how I tend
to think of it now.

    I was a college student, a
freshman at the University of
Michigan, and Harry Bratt, who wrote
the interface, was still a high
school student. He wrote the
software, which was tested by other
high school students, so in a way you
could say that SID PLAYER was made by
kids. I'll come back to this thing
about kids at the end of my talk.

    My interest in computer music
came about by listening to music put
out by Walter Carlos, Tamita and
Synergy, the big three that I
discovered. In fact I heard many of
the Bach classical pieces as
electronic versions before I ever
heard them performed by a real
orchestra, so I had sort of an
unusual background. The way I first
got introduced to electronic music
was at Disneyland; they had something
called the Main Street Electrical
Parade, which used synthesizer music
broadcast at nighttime. So for the
SID PLAYER stuff, I consider
Disneyland's Electrical Parade to be
the starting point of it all.

    In fact, the last song Harry did,
and remains unfinished, was the music
from the Main Street Electrical
Parade.

    When I was about 14 or so I was
babysitting for a family and I
noticed that in a back room the
father had this brand new thing,
called an Apple II. He let me use it,
so after the kids had gone to bed, he
and I would play with it. That's
where I learned BASIC and the first
things about computers. He worked for
a company that sold them but instead
I chose to get an Ohio Scientific
computer, in part because it ran at 2
MHz, which was twice as fast as the
Commodore running at 1 MHz.

    With the money I had saved up
from lawn-mowing, delivering
newspapers and babysitting I was able
to buy the computer, which ran around
$1800 in 1980. I had to dip into
money that I had saved for college
but luckily my parents allowed me to
do that. It was a good decision.

    That's where I learned BASIC. The
BASIC that was on the Ohio Scientific
was the very same Microsoft Version 2
BASIC that's on the Commodore 64.

    And now for the controversy part.
My high school bought four of these
Ohio Scientific computers, which was
great for me, but by then I had
learned just about everything I
wanted to about that machine. The new
thing that was out there was the
Atari home computer, and that's what
I bought. That's where I learned
about color and graphics and sound.

    In my opinion, the Atari home
computer was a better-designed
computer than the Commodore 64.

 [Nervous grumblings from the]
[audience...]

    I knew that would get you riled
up. But consider, when they were
designing the Commodore 64 they
didnt't really know what all they
were going to be coming up with. They
took a sound chip that had been in
development for something else; they
took a BASIC language which hadn't
really been enhanced for any special
features for the graphics. This was
great for me because it opened up an
opportunity for me to write a book
that provided graphics utilities.
But in general, they just cobbled a
bunch of things together.

    Unfortunately the Atari company
didn't really know what they had on
their hands, and in my opinion, they
didn't know how to market it. A lot
of people bought the Commodore 64
merely sold on the fact that it had
64K of RAM compared to all the other
computers, which had less. The public
didn't know how to evaluate one
computer against another and they
just went for the number, 64, that
was in the name of the Commodore. I
think that's what sold a lot of them,
initially.

    The Atari had a sound chip in it
called the POKEY chip. It was the
POtentiometer and KEYboard
controller. I wrote a little music
player program for that. The whole
purpose of it was to add Donkey Kong
type music to game programs, so it
would play on the interrupt. This was
called POKEY PLAYER and was published
in SoftSide Magazine. The download
files for that were extremely popular
because they were very small. I had a
way of compressing the data so that
there was less than two bytes needed
per note. In the days of 300 baud
modems the program was very popular
on BBSes.

    Harry Bratt designed that editor
and I designed the file format and
did all the assembly language
programming.

    Around this time, in the mail I
received a disk and letter from a
Robert Huffman and he said how much
he enjoyed using POKEY PLAYER. On the
disk was a song he had done called
Bach's Brandenburg Concerto, No. 5,
First Movement, which blew me away
because I was using the program for
Donkey Kong music and this guy was
using it for Brandenburg Concerto. He
was using a crude editor which only
allowed you to enter one voice at a
time. You have to save a file, load
up another file, and put in another
voice and hope that they all
synchronized at the end.

   His song made me realize that all
this was going to go off in a new
direction. At the end of my Freshman
year at the University of Michigan I
got a call from one Scott Card, who
was the book editor at Compute!
Publications. Later on he went on to
gain fame as the science fiction
author, Orson Scott Card. He wrote
[Ender's Game] and other books and is
still actively writing today.

    He called me up and asked me if I
might write POKEY PLAYER in an
enhanced version to be included in a
book, and at that time Sheldon Leemon
was telling me about the Commodore 64
as being the hot new computer. The
Atari was sort of going down the
tubes. So I talked Orson Scott Card
into doing two books, which became
All About the Commodore 64, Volume 1
and 2. Volume 1 was the tutorial
BASIC and the intention for Volume 2
was to include the graphics and music
tools I had created for the Atari,
converted for the Commodore. POKEY
PLAYER was to become SID PLAYER.

    I had written what is called
"player missile graphics" on the
Atari; what is called sprites on the
C-64. So that's what Volume 2 was all
about -- conversions of the utilities
from the Atari for the C-64. It took
about a year to do all of that so I
took a year off from college to
finish that work.

    When I did the music system for
the Commodore the working name of it
was SID PLAYER. I fully intended to
come up with a better name for it,
but never did...which was a problem
since people call songs created for
SID PLAYER "SID songs", which is what
they also called songs made for other
players.

    I noticed an intersting thing
that happened around this time. In
All About the Commodore 64 Volume 2
there were two programs: one was a
sprite control system and the other
was some bitmap graphics routines for
doing fills and other stuff. These
provided statements you would put
into a program you were writing. And
then there was SID EDITOR, where you
didn't have to do any programming;
you just had to put in the music.

    Right around this time is when we
saw a transition in the Commodore
community from one of being
hobbyists, to one of being users.
Hobbyists would like to write
programs and get the magazines and
type in the programs, learning how to
program. Users would not be
interested in programming, but would
just want to load a program and use
it. SID EDITOR was one of the first
"user" programs.

    I think the whole computing world
made this transition from being
mainly hobbyists to being users at
this time. Obviously, today most
people are not interested in
programming, but only interested in
using computers.

    Because the SID PLAYER took off
so well, I did a new version called
ENHANCED SID PLAYER, which was in
part my opportunity to get rid of
some frustrations with the editor
written in BASIC. Harry had done a
great job but it was in BASIC and
very slow. So I rewrote the whole
thing in 35K of assembly language,
which I'm glad to have done.

    The new SID PLAYER was sold as a
book and disk combinat