Atari XL/XE music - David Whittaker

[@spearPYN]

Panther... possibly the best Atari tune.

[@sedivy.fotograf]

and Warhawk.

[@daliborpelc257]

Draconus ever

[@jamesheyworth3566]

Red max 2:30. Grand Prix simulator, 4:03. Storm 5:22. Panther 8:05 BMX Simulator. All great tunes, you gotta love the pokey!!

[@ELTomeq]

Panther..... there is no better tune !

Panther reminds me of Jean Michelle Jarre

[@Fercur69]

STORM!!!! what a beautiful memories...

[@markhopwood6928]

Pokey seems to be able to generate what sounds like a pseudo sawtooth wave (the metallic background notes in Storm, Panther). I guess this is the ring modulator? Interesting sound chip to have just square waves, but ring modulation and the high pass filter as well.

[@jeanlesueur6936]

Pokey have a special feature called "poly counters". These are some kind of pseudo random generators. Pokey have several of them, offering different sizes. These are used to make some complex synthetic sounds. This is the feature giving the pokey it's very own sound signature.

[@MattMcIrvin]

@@jeanlesueur6936 There's an excellent explanation of how they're used here: www.atariarchives.org/dere/chapt07.php There was also a volume-only mode in which the CPU could just directly control the speaker position to produce any waveform--that's presumably how they did things like snippets of sampled speech, though I don't suppose you could have that while you were doing anything else.

[@jeanlesueur6936]

@@MattMcIrvin Yep, I can confirm that sampled speech was rendered using the 4 bit DAC under the "volume only mode". And yes, this required important part of CPU power(as for any 8 bit machine at this time). In addition, on the Atari 8 bit, this could also require shutting down display if you wanted good speech quality. Because display was stealing some RAM access slots from CPU, display caused irregularities to speech. You can hear it in the title song of the "Ghostbusters" game which didn't shut down display while rendering speech.

[@RichardM-kv4uu]

@@jeanlesueur6936 It depends on how the samples are played back - if it's just a subroutine then VBI gets in the way of it, but if it's played back via interrupts (like Space Harrier for example) then the sound is as clear as can be expected on an 8bit machine!

[@mortaj]

Great to hear this again after so many years. Thank you.

[@nickolasgaspar9660]

Its really interesting to hear how different composers use their own "sounds" to emulate different instruments.

[@HuntersMoon78]

I'm liking the sound of the PoKEY chip, it has a different sound compared to the C64 SID Chip and Spectrum AY 3-8912

[@MattMcIrvin]

Atari used the POKEY in their arcade games too, but in the later ones, they often included a separate Yamaha chip just for music and retained the POKEY for sound effects, because it was so good at things like explosions and engine noises.

yeah, it was fun making games with pokey

[@storminboy]

It had 4 channels. Always thought music programmers could get a lot more out this chip. Maybe it was very difficult to programme.

[@CarBitGTSaxen]

David Whittaker is one of the best game composer evers, if not the best. Way better than Toby Fox, whose Undertale music is overly overrated. David Whittaker is the real GOAT.

[@urmo345]

Storm

[@captainfuture2882]

I like the little brother of Paula :)

[@sighin]

Panther and BMX are the greates trakcs to me.

[@SP6QKX]

Nice :) / Greetings from Poland .

[@adroharv9213]

Couldn't identify it at first but the Storm piece is of course from Shadow of the Beast which is hardly surprising considering they're both DW

[@marquisor]

YEAH RED MAX TUNE RULEZ!

[@stop_recycle]

Make me notice my tinnitus again :)

[@gamerbrosmaximuz7125]

8:29 knight rider

[@agelastus943]

If I got my facts right we have to thank Mr. Whittaker for the Zombie Nation's Kenkraft 400 (check YT for the history of that track, short and awesome). Panther is in my top 10 of Atari music and I agree it sounds better on Atari than C64. So much good music forgotten in the past... Adam Gilmore, Rob Hubbard, David Whittaker... oh man.

[@164dyny164]

4 best ever

[@essigline]

Technically well done, I hear no difference to the master Rob Hubbard on the Atari XL/XE . But Rob had another talent in addition to that: producing earworms with a great meldody. I`m quite missing these points in David's tunes.

[@Alianger]

4:03 Anyone else hear the shadow of the beast ost in this? :)

[@andyvaisey]

See where you're coming from, but when I listen, all I hear is Whittaker's music from the game 'Leviathan' on the C64 or Spectrum; tell me you can't hear the same bass line! So he 'duplicated' himself a year later in Leviathan, with a different melody over the top! Listen to the C64 version of 'Storm' and the drums/percussion are even the same in Leviathan!

[@adroharv9213]

yeah it's certainly the first 9 or so notes of the theme from Beast for sure

[@tharkthax3960]

Yes I see what you mean. Never noticed before. 👍

[@MrKarolWlodarczyk]

I cant hear it. Which SOTB?

[@Alianger]

@@MrKarolWlodarczyk Intro theme to the first one. This is a faster but similar melody and bass note progression.

[@Naturenerd1000]

Great sound track. Sounds like Rymdreglage

[@blogfiles]

Red Max sounds better than on C64 IMHO :)

[@dava_arvarabi]

I agree

[@martinbyrne3790]

Red Max does sound better on the Atari, despite the pokey being inferior to the SID, the punchy sound of the pokey works better on some tunes like Draconus for example

[@cybernit3]

POKEY nice square waves..... SID ADSR I LIKE MORE....

[@alexandervalle525]

Defimetly poley music is better than sid.