pouët.net

Go to bottom

Hollywood Medieval by Atari, Inc.

    This is the User Manual for
         Hollywood Medieval
  __________________________________



        **********************
  *** *** HOLLYWOOD MEDIEVAL *** ***
  * *** ********************** *** *

         by DOUGLAS CROCKFORD

    Program and manual contents
    (C)1982 Atari, Inc.
    Music (C) 1982 Douglas Crockford

    Music used by permission. All
    rights reserved.



      PLEASE COPY THIS PROGRAM
      ------------------------
  You are invited to make copies of
  this program and to distribute them
  free of charge to other Atari
  owners.



          ******************
          Hollywood Medieval
          ******************

           P A R T   O N E



               OVERVIEW
               --------

  HOLLYWOOD MEDIEVAL is a piece of
  music which you fly through with
  your computer. This is an
  interactive musical experience. 
  You have control over the music,
  choosing a course through the many
  melodies.

  This..."thing???" (it seems more
  than a program but isn't exactly a
  game) is suitable for all ages.

  Read Part One of this manual for
  the instructions on how to run
  Hollywood Medieval. Read Part Two
  only if you care to discover
  something more about it.


         HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS
         ---------------------

  -24K RAM using Disk Drive

  -ATARI 810/1050 Disk Drive

  -Optional Accessories:

   1-4 Atari Joystick Controllers



           GETTING STARTED
           ---------------
  Load the Hollywood Medieval
  program. The program will load into
  computer memory and start auto-
  matically.

  If you care to, plug one or more
  Joysticks into any of the
  controller jacks.



     PERFORMING HOLLYWOOD MEDIEVAL
     -----------------------------

  First you will see a title screen
  and hear the opening fanfare. The
  title screen will fade out and will
  be replaced by a display of flying
  through a rectangular trench. This
  is a graphical representation of
  the music.  Don't pay too much
  attention to it.  Mostly, use your
  ears.

  The action is controlled by the
  three yellow console buttons:

  OPTION:  Start the program over.

  SELECT:  Stop the music.  Press
           SELECT again to continue.

  START:   Take the next turn.


  NOTE: For your convenience, any
  Joystick Button will have the same
  meaning as START:  Take the next
  turn.

  What does it mean to take a turn?
  Well, when the program starts, it
  repeats the fanfare over and over. 
  It does this until you press START,
  which causes you to turn and go an
  alternate way through the trench.
  There are many places in the piece
  where the music can continue to go
  its own way or to go in some other
  direction.  As you explore
  Hollywood Medieval you will
  discover the turning places and the
  consequences (always benign) of
  taking the turn or not.

  So play around, see what you can
  hear. At first many of the melodies
  may sound alike to you.  As you get
  better acquainted, you should be
  able to distinguish the melodies
  and to tell the variations from the
  repeats.



          A FUN CHALLENGE!
          ----------------

  For the gamesters, I offer one
  small challenge.  In the game Sir
  Galahad and the Holy Grail
  (APX-20132 / Now available from
  ANTIC Publishing) there is music
  played when the Grail is finally
  delivered to the Chapel.  That
  music is the finale or coda of
  Hollywood Medieval.  Try to find
  it.  You will know when you've gone
  past it because silence follows.
  Press START or OPTION to start
  over.



            P A R T   T W O


            ABOUT THE MUSIC
            ---------------

  The music was written in a style I
  call Hollywood Medieval, after that
  great guy, Mister Hollywood
  himself, Carl Hollywood.

  It probably doesn't sound anything
  at all like the secular music of
  the Middle Ages.  It does sound
  quite a lot like the music most of
  us would expect to hear in a movie
  about the Middle Ages. (It's
  important to keep your mythologies
  straight.)

  I've been collecting melodies like
  these for many years.  The melodies
  assembled here are similar to each
  other in key, style, and tempo so
  that the flow can pretty much go
  from one to another without the
  need of transition material.

  As far as I am aware, the material
  is all original. The only
  deliberate plagiarism is the
  insertion of one measure of Bolero,
  for which I am indebted to Maurice
  Ravel and Peter Schickele.



        ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE
        ---------------------

  The sounds are extruded from a
  device called POKEY.  POKEY is the
  Atari I/O and audio chip.  It
  creates square waves from simple
  counters and shift registers.  It
  is quite limited in its production
  of musical sounds, but does
  represent a very inexpensive way to
  synthesize music.

  I did several things to try to
  improve the quality of what you
  hear, the most audible being
  envelope generation. I also made
  lots of changes to the music
  itself. For example, I had to place
  each voice in a different octave or
  they would all blah together.
  Close harmony sounds horrible,
  forcing me to throw out some of my
  favorite stuff.

  I also had to cut the number of
  voices down to three or four. Even
  having four voices makes POKEY
  sound muddy.  I used a trick where
  two voices are coupled into a
  single voice with greater range and
  better intonation.  I tried to add
  color by varying the envelopes, but
  in the end it still sounds like
  square waves. I am eagerly looking
  forward to the next generation of
  personal computers with integral
  high-quality synthesizers. That
  should be fun.

  Speaking of fun, this program began
  as an experiment in integrating
  music into the action of video
  games. Great eh?



          ABOUT THE DISPLAY
          -----------------

  The display is in ANTIC mode C,
  which is a high-resolution 2-color
  mode. Display-list interrupt is
  placed at the vanishing point to
  set the color for the floor. The
  wall detail is made out of
  missiles, which get brighter and
  wider as they reach the edges.

  The playfield is very wide,
  eliminating the usual borders. 
  Using a fast-fill and two buffers,
  a new playfield is produced 15
  times a second.  The missiles are
  moved 60 times a second, improving
  the apparent frame rate.

  If the program goes 9 minutes or so
  without a turn, then color shifting
  begins.  This is called "attract
  mode" for historical reasons.  It
  prevents damage to your picture
  tube.  Not all personal computers
  have this feature. But then, the
  Atari is far ahead of its time! Shop
  and compare.



         DEVELOPMENT TOOLS
         -----------------

  I arranged the music using a Casio
  MT-30, my daughter Jane's
  Schoenhut, and Atari's Music
  Composer cartridge which is a very
  dull tool indeed.

  The programming was done on two
  Atari 800's.  One was equipped with
  an Axlon Ramdisk.  The other was
  attached to a 20MB Corvus Disk
  System via a Multiplexer network.
  It has been wonderful working with
  the Corvus.  I don't know how I
  managed to put Galahad together
  with just a couple of 810's and an
  Assembler/Editor cartridge (another
  very dull tool).

  I used versions of MEDIT and AMAC
  (Atari's Macro Assembler) which had
  been modified to run on the Corvus.
  The music was prepared with a
  music compiler that I wrote in C,
  specifically John Palevich's Deep
  Blue C (APX-20166 / Now available
  from ANTIC Publishing), a nice
  tool.  I used Basic/A+ to do a
  couple of cheap and dirty utilities
  along the way.  Both ran on the
  Corvus without modification.



           USE AND ENJOY!
           +++++++++++++
Go to top