· C64The SID is tough (and it's slapping me around)
Confession: music is the hardest part of the whole C64 test. The SID is not a beeper, it's a real synthesizer: 3 voices, ADSR envelopes, analog filters, and zero mercy for someone coming from WebAudio, where a note is one line of JavaScript. Here a note is a 16-bit frequency register to compute, an envelope to program, and a player to write in assembly inside the raster interrupt without blowing the frame budget. For now the build has sound effects only: jump, death, flag. Music will come, at its own pace: doing the SID justice is a craft of its own, and I'm still an apprentice. With an aggravating factor, the setup: barely an hour a night, kids asleep, volume near zero so I don't wake them. Learning a synthesizer on tiptoe.