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!
+++++++++++++[ back to the prod ]