NEW 2-VOICE MUSIC
By Mike Peace
ARCADIAN 5, no. 3 (Jan. 14, 1983): 53.


Everyone has been mentioning the "New Sound" coming from some of my latest 
games.  Well I guess I'll let you in on how it is done.  Most of the music you 
have heard from the Astrocade has been a kind of "Organ Music," nothing like 
what you hear at the arcades in games like FROGGER and VENTURE and all kinds of 
others. I made a small discovery, and it's very simple to do music like the big 
boys do.  Here is a short program and some music from FROGGER. Once you get it 
all keyed in, you'll hear the difference and I'm sure you'll like it.

10 FOR A=0 TO 28                - Sets up to play 29 notes
20 TA=*(A)[divided-by]100;TB=RM - Sets Tone A to first value,tone B to second
30 FOR VA=15 TO 1STEP-1;VB=VA-1 - Accents volume of tone a & b and fades out to
40 NEXT VA;NEXT                 - a give a chime sound

To program in the notes for your music program enter this statement without a 
line number:

FOR A=0 TO 28;INPUT*(A);NEXT A;RUN GO

Now key in the following values hitting GO after each one is correctly printed 
on screen.

3923  3923  4729  4729  3923  3923  4729  4729  3522  3522  3923  3923  4426

0     0     0     3522  3522  3923  3923  4426  0     17    0     3119  3522  

3923  4426  4729

After all the values are in, the music will play. Just RUN the program to hear 
it again. Each of the numbers above represents 2 musical notes and are being 
stored together in pairs (one each string value). This saves a lot of bytes if 
you plan to use it in a program. This full program could fit easily on one line 
instead of 4 and could be used as a subroutine in a program that could use some 
nice 2-voice music. Next month I'll give you a program to write the music using 
a keyboard appearing on your TV screen.