I feel like the history and memory of gaming at home is largely dominated by American reflections of playing
Japanese home consoles.
As a result most of early gamings most famous composers are also Japanese:
Koji Kondo, Nobuo Uematsu, Yoko Shimomura and Yuzo Koshiro to name but a few.
But the famous composers of C64 music are all much closer to home, largely being from Europe
and all fluent in English, which allows for a lot of firsthand consumption of written and spoken interviews
which I feel gives a much closer link to these icons of gaming history than something fan-translated from
Japanese
by a third-party
When I first revisted Commodore 64 music as an adult, it was with embarrased hands-wringing, thinking it was
"Good for the time" and "Not actually comparable to famous Arcade music of the day, like Street Fighter 2"
But this was an inaccuracy on my part. The Commodore 64 launched in 1982, and Street Fighter 2
(the most famous arcade game for people of my age-group) came out in 1991.
That's nearly a full decade, or a console generation and a half! It was obviously never going to be fair to
compare
things of clearly different eras, but since the C64 is older than I am, I had just assumed that everything
that
existed when I was a child were contemporaries of each other.
When comparing the C64 to arcade games of the early 80s, I was genuinely shocked to realise that while the
graphics were obviously inferior, since the arcade hardware was more powerful, the C64 music absolutely
blows
the arcade music out of the water. How could this be possible?
For an example lets listen to the original theme song to the arcade version of Commando, released by Capcom in 1985
Now lets listen to the music of the C64 port, released that same year
Even though the hardware is considerably less powerful than an arcade machine, it sounds better. How is this possible?
Computer audio sound chips have a set number of audio channels available, or voices.
Similar to how a human voice cannot sing a melody and a harmony at the same time, computer
audio channels have a similar restriction.
The number of channels limits how many simultaneous noises a sound chip can produce.
Some computer audio chips took it a step further, and allowed each channel to only produce a single kind of
noise.
There are four kinds of soundwaves that could be produced by hardware of the day:
As you can see the first two channels are solely dedicated to the square waves, the third to triangle,
and the fourth to noise. These channels could produce these and only these sounds. If a composer wished to
compose a song using 3 or 4 square wave sounds, this was not possible. Also note there is no channel for
sawtooth so the NES could not produce this sound at all.
Though not strictly relevant to this topic, the fifth "PCM sample" channel on the NES was used for sampling,
or snippets of real world voices or music. But because this was incredibly storage space intensive on the
small
size cartridges of the day, it was rarely used.
Known as the Sound Interface Device, or SID, it allowed for what feels like considerably more complexity
and depth to the music all with a distinctive "synth" flavour.
Even though it only had three sound channels.
How did it do it?
As you can see, not only can the C64 SID chip do the sawtooth waveform which the NES cannot.
It also can freely reassign each channel to be each waveform as it so wishes.
This music is visualised in an Oscilloscope so you can see each of the three different sound channels at work
See the different waveforms on the same channel?
Try watching only one track at a time, and you'll see it jump back and forth between two different waveforms, like square and noise
As mentioned, the C64 had an excellent geographic variance in where the composers hailed from