Loadstar 247/247.d81/t.zuke

Text File | 2022-08-26 | 3KB | 113 lines

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          THE ZUCCINNI SONG
           by Dave Moorman


    'Tis the season for zuccinni
around here, and my wife's garden has
once again grown to humongous pro-
portions. And I have finally given up
in my never ending battle for truth,
justice, and no more zuccinni!

    But along the way, I came up with
a silly (though satisfying) little
song about the ubiquitous squash. Each
year, it seems, I added another verse.
And last year, the chorus came out of
a desire to include the audience in
the song.

    This year, I can't get the tune
and words out of my mind. So you will
have to endure it -- and perhaps get
hooked!

    The technical question was once
again, "How much can we pack in 65536
bytes of memory?" This babe does a
fair job of it. Two of the pictures
are my own spastic attempts. The other
two came off the Web. (What did we do
before Google?) The trick was to
reduce the pictures to line drawings,
bring them into Commodorea with GoDot,
squish them down and add text with
Doodle, then tighten the result up
with LOADSTAR's own STBPRINT. The
finished SHP graphic files use only 46
pages of memory.

    But I also wanted some action --
especially for the chorus. As you will
see, zuccinni lovers and zuccinni
haters are pitted against each other
during the refrain. That brought to
mind cheering crowds.

    Back to Google Images -- searching
for "cheering crowd." And I found a
picture of four guys with their arms
up in the air. Good. But some should
cheer for love, some for hate. The
answer was to use Adobe Photo Delux to
cut off the guys arms and twist them
down -- with a little touch-up to re-
locate their poor abused shoulders.
Then I cut out one arms-up guy and
pasted him among the arms-down group
-- and vice versa.

    These images had to be put on the
screen quickly -- and not consume much
memory. The Mini-Bitmap Screen
routines were just what I needed.
SCREEN.ML will display a 128x96 pixel
image on the text screen (in this case
-- twice -- to double the crowd). The
image is really a font, which was easy
to change with one POKE.

    The music was transcribed on
SIDSmith, converted to SIDPlayer, then
touched up with SID Editor. I am no
great shakes at SIDizing -- certainly
no John Zaputa or Corky Cochran. But
the tune is there and life is good.

    I don't know how to do synch with
SIDPlayer, so I just timed the song,
hitting a key to stop the music and
display TI at each change point. This
was put into an array to control the
program. The "cheering crowd"
animation was simply offsets from the
major array. Once I got the timing
right, everything fell into place.

    For the title and end screen, I
used Mr.Mick to create FTS files --
which have custom font characters,
screen, and color information in 16
pages. To put is all together, I used
UNPACKER89 (at page 206) to display
the SHP graphics, SCREEN158, to
display the cheering crowd, SID.OBJ.64
(SIDPlayer), and a tiny relocatable
bit of code called M1.FTSRE.ML, which
puts the FTS graphics on the screen.

    Though everything is linked and
packed, I have included the ML
routines and proper documentation for
those adventurous souls who would like
to do something like this. The
fiddlation time can be excruciating.
But the reward at the end can be a
nice presentation.

    Or, it can be like this program!

 DMM