Old school productions on real hardware, by a real hooman with real limitations and big dreams
Skuggemannen
Chiptunes and productions under the demoscene handle Skuggemannen, by Øyvind Winther.
In the late 80s, life was all about electric guitar, drums and heavy rock. Recording your own music back then was a big dream, so when the Atari Falcon030 came out in the early 90s, with MIDI and audio recording built in, taking a painful student loan to build a home studio around it was a no-brainer.
The problem was that it took a lot more than the machine itself to make it work, and gear for the Falcon was bloody hard to get hold of back then, and still is. Recording with Cubase Audio was out of reach, so most of the music from those years came from messing around in Digital Tracker.
The Falcon stayed around, used for everything except what it was bought for. The PC took over by the end of the 90s, with interwebs and everything, but the Falcon kept coming along for the ride, through school work, music tinkering and gaming alike. The dream of an album made on it with Cubase Audio is still alive, but the technical hurdles keep it some way off.
In 2017 things took off again when Sinatra got Skuggemannen to come along to Solskogen, which was the introduction to the demoscene. The music on the Falcon started up again, first with maxYMiser by gwEm and later ACE Tracker by New Beat, and then also SID-Wizard on the Commodore 64 and ProTracker on the Amiga 500.
The core has always been to make the music on near-original hardware.
Demoscene
Always up for collaborating on productions, demos or anything else on old hardware. Send a message.
Album
Shades of Circuits
- Made
- 2018 / 2019
- Made with
- maxYMiser
- Machine
- Atari Falcon030
- Won
- Solskogen 2019, old school music compo (Bowdog, track #2)
- Music disc
- Sommarhack 2021, code by Joska
"Shades of Circuits" is a chip music album made with maxYMiser during 2018/2019. Bowdog (track #2) won the old school music compo of Solskogen 2019, a pretty sweet victory as this was the first release ever made on Atari Falcon030 after 26 years of service. maxYMiser also runs on the Atari ST, so Bowdog is listed as an Atari ST/E tune.
The album was later released as a music disc at Sommarhack 2021 with intro/outro and pixel art and poetry to accompany each track.
Shades of Circuits is dedicated to Ståle Solem (R.I.P), who shared a mutual fascination and interest in Atari Falcon030.
Atari Falcon music disc release
Game soundtrack
L'Abbaye des Morts
- Tracks
- 15
- Made with
- maxYMiser, 3 channels on the YM chip
- Platform
- Atari Falcon
After releasing the Shades of Circuits chiptune album, Skuggemannen came in touch with Joska, who was working on releasing a Falcon version of the l'Abbaye des Morts game. Joska was looking for new and original music for the game. In the end 15 tracks were made using maxYMiser with only 3 channels on the YM chip and with CPU-friendly sounds. They experimented quite a bit with different trackers and sample-based solutions to use the Falcon's capabilities to its full potential, but could not find a good solution within the limited time. So maxYMiser, being a rock solid tool, got the job done.