˙˙00˙ ˙00˙01˙03˙01On Playing SID Tunes˙00 ˙02˙or Wherever that Title Will Take Us˙ ˙00 ˙ ˙ ˙03˙02PUH / AGONY ˙01˙01˙00˙ ˙I have about a hundred SID tunes on my HD, and I am certainly the one in Oepir Staff who has the least (except for Tobias Jansson, who has no SIDS at all.). As opposed to S.Duvan and toj, though, I listen to what I have, and I have learned to love it. In the beginning, I reacted like any PC freak would have done (and still do); I listened to the quality of the sound, and then I turned it off in favour of four-channel modules. I suppose this reaction is quite normal, try it on your parents or girlfriend and you will see what I mean. I think it's pretty clear, though, that those with girlfriends don't appreciate SIDs. I don't know if this holds true, it's just an observation of mine. (Could it be that they are not hard enough? ;) It took me a year or two to take up realize that SIDs are art in one piece, and that it is well worth all imaginable appreciation. The way it is now, I do everything to SID music. I write, wash, clean, make my bed and even study ("read my biology books") to the three-channel-sound of the 6581 SID chip (well, that's a lie, anyway; I never do the dishes and I seldom clean). My mother thinks I am losing it when the tones of Bombo escapes my closed door and I assure her that I am reading. Nobody, she seems to think, can combine effective studies with SID emulation simultaneously and achieve a satisfactory result. Well, listen to this, ma, I'm special. I like to do it this way, and you better shut the fuck up. You can verify my study results with the number of SID tunes on my music partition, ma, and you will see that there is a direct correspondence between the two of them. Now you see it - now you don't. What I want to know is if I am breaking the law. Is it illegal to keep, store and use those wonderful SIDs? (Well, of course I refer to the copyrighted tunes of e.g., games, and not to the scene-related tunes.) My best shot says that it IS illegal; the copyright is still valid (though old), and the SIDs are provided with information on author, year, and company (if any). Still, even though the copyright is valid, I suppose they look upon violences against it with forgiving eyes. They (by which means the companies (such as Elite and U.S. Gold)) won't make any more money on those games, and judging by the fact that most (?) C64 games as well as their music are to be found on the Internet, I suppose they have more or less released them to the public and given out a green card (this is not golf, sucker (if I ever started a golf magazine, it would be called GOLF 2000)). That's a good thing to do, and I just wish that many of those OLD Amiga games would fit under the same label. (Do you remember Faery Tale Adventure? Rolling Thunder? Elf? Future Tank? Sarcophaser? Have you ever played Defender of the Crown or Garrison?). If anyone has the game "Sinbad" released sometime around the beginning of 1987, you should mail Duvan immediately: d95duvan@dtek.chalmers.se. What I'd like to point at here is that I want to have an Amiga 500 with KS 1.2 so that I could play a those ancient, illegally achieved games. They won't start on my A1200 (well, of course, I have no pirated games at all, but if I had had any, I reckon they would not have worked very well with the AGA chipset (Advanced Graphics Architecture, that's what AGA stands for, I've been told)). Polyfemos has one VERY cool 1.2, and EVERY old game works on that machine when the extra memory is removed. So, hey, software companies and copyright holder, how about this: ˙02*˙01 Please release all Amiga games from 1986 (like Faery Tale Adventure) to at least 1991 to the public as PD. Please make it legal to copy, use, and spread those games. Or, you could put them on a bunch of CDs and sell them for a small sum. ˙02*˙01 You will never make any more money on those games if they stay commercial. You could, though, charge a small sum for the spreading of them as shareware; you are, after all, the copyright holder. ˙02*˙01 Not only would you do the peoples of the world a favour by releasing these games, you would also do something for the sake of Amiga. You would do something to help those real computer pioneers (well, do you think Phantasie III was written in AsmOne and with the help of ProTracker?) to the pages of history (where they belong more than Bill Gates and the author of Word). I think they prefer seeing their games (some of which are more than twelve years old) being spread and used once again to seeing them collecting dust in the basement of some greedy software giant in the States. ˙02*˙01 If you put those games on your homepage (as .lha / .DMS as well as in the format used by those Amiga emulators) I can guarantee you that you would have a lot of visitors, visitors who gladly would accept to raise your "number of visitors" signs or read through your commercial strips. Keep in mind, folks, that I am no born gamer. As everybody else ("why deny?"), I had a game period in the late eighties and early nineties, during which I gradually got closer to the scene and the people associated to it, and then I joined the scene for real (and for good ;). Today, I do not play games. It happens that I challenge my brother in TurboRAKETTI or MasterBlaster, but that's about it. I have never played Quake or TombRaider II, and I would not say that I'm interested in playing any games at all when it comes to computing. Still, some days, I wake up, go upstairs to my KS 1.3, and just sit there with my IL SCURO cracks. I figure there's nothing better in the world than escaping into the realms of forgotten and underestimated games once in a while. (PC folks never do that. When was the last time you saw Stugan?) If there's anybody out there interesting in swapping 1986-1989 games, please contact me. I am, of course, totally uninterested in swapping those PC CDs with hundreds of Megabytes of games; all I want to do is to look at games that NOBODY cares for anymore. That, however, makes me a criminal; that makes it dangerous for me to write what I just wrote (i.e., that I wanted to swap old games). Now, this is sick. What you should look for, pirate hunters, are those guys that sell compact disks full of the latest, most thrilling and most expensive games (i.e., those who make money on other people's work); I'm simply not worth the effort of tracking down (which will take you about as long time as it takes to find the "Addresses" article). Give me an original copy of each of those old games, and I will buy each and every one of them. But that's just not possible, is it? No, those games are gone forever. The last copies were sold in 1987, after which nobody has seen them. You simply can't buy them anymore. Where are they now? Beats me. I'd say it's not more than fair that there are a few of us that look after them, saving them for the posterity. We are, after all, doing the world a favour! But, oh, no, we are evil pirates, and we must be crushed and nailed to the core. Instead of watching us, you should try to catch those who sell games that are still being sold in the stores; you should put down all of your effort in trying to bust and lock away the organized piracy for good. Go ahead, do it, I am as much against piracy as you are. You should, however, keep your nose away from us and our 1987 games. Face it, guys, we are no criminals, we are cultural workers. Well, there you see. The article started out as a text on SID emulation and ended up as 1987 game propaganda. There are rules, and I am the one that makes them. ˙01