What was your first computer?

A ZX81

How did you get into programming, and what was your first program?

I got into programming completely by accident. Someone asked me to repair a graphics board for a ZX81, because they'd heard from a neighbour that I was into electronics. What they didn't know was that I'd never laid hands on a computer before, I was only into analogue/audio electronics (I used to write articles for mags like Practical Electronics, Maplin Magazine, etc). The owner of the ZX81 was Colin Hogg (now co-owner of the Code Monkeys). He left the ZX81 here for a couple of weeks, and by the time he came back to collect it I was hooked. It was also the start of what was to be a long programming partnership.
My very first program? I vaguely remember one that made diagonal "wallpaper patterns" from block graphics.

What was your first commercial program? (I remember it being mentioned in the AA interview you did, I should probably dig it out and read it again)

The Scout Steps Out (Amsoft). I hadn't seen this for years until I saw it again on the Emulator.
The intro screen still looked as comical as ever ... the gangs of stomping scouts ... the giant bowl of cornflakes ... but the actual game now seems very fiddly and frustrating.
I'd love to know whether anyone completed it, especially the "Sinister Bends" screen, which was a swine of a timing puzzle.
Apart from the Scout, my only other involvements with graphics and game design were in Radzone and Biospheres. They were all co-written with Colin, and they were all "Amstrad-only" programs, written specifically for the CPC. We relied quite heavily on it's features (Radzone for example was Just a mass of RSX's! ) so it would have been a real pain to convert to other platforms.
By the way, it was no accident that there were 42 screens in Radzone and Biospheres... I'm a big fan of Douglas Adams.
And while we're talking trivia, I'd like to explain why I used the title "J.Dave Rogers". It wasn't done for effect, it's just a family tradition to use the middle name (my dad for example is J.L.Rogers but is known as Les).

What came first, programming or music?

Music. I used to play in bands in and around the Liverpool area.

How did you break into commercial programming?

By selling type-ins to magazines for a while, then submitting the Scout to Amsoft.
After Biospheres, I did music and sound only, and I broke into that by sending a disk of demo tunes to Hewson, one of which ended up being used for Zynaps (another was later used for Turbo Boat Simulator (Probe)).

What was the first game tune you wrote?

The first tune that I did specifically for a game was for "Flee" (a pacman clone for the Dragon computer).
The _oldest_ bit of music however, is in Cybernoid, because part of the theme tune was written about ten years before the game! The first part of the tune was written along with the game, but it reminded me of an idea that I'd had years earlier.
Both sequences take you from Gminor to Cmajor, but via different chords, so I joined the two together, with the older part becoming the middle variation of the tune.
I quite liked the thought that this fragment of music eventually made it into the outside world after having survived for ten years in a bunch of half forgotten neurons.

Which was the first game from Hewson to have one of your tunes in it then?

Zynaps. It was one of the four tunes on my demo disk, Hewson decided to use it for Zynaps.
On the demo disk it had the somewhat cringeworthy working-title of "Medieval Rock"!

How did you go about coming up with tunes for games? Did you just get told what the game was about and left to it, or did you get shown graphics or early playable versions to give you a feel for the game?

With Hewson, if it was a conversion from the C64 then they'd send me a videotape of the game, being played by someone, I think it was usually Paul Chamberlain. For original games it was just a verbal or written description, sometimes very brief, so there really wasn't much to go on. For the sound FX, I'd be sent a list ... what the fx were for, how long they should last, etc.
Then later on, after the programmers had installed the code, I might get a few phone calls if any needed changing. In fact, very few of them ever asked for changes, with the notable exception of Chris Wood when we were doing Nebulus.
He was forever pushing me for improvements, mostly for reductions in the execution time of the driver. But I'm not complaining, it showed that he cared about the end product. Nebulus is still one of my favourite CPC progs for gameplay. Later on, doing music with the Code Monkeys I had more access to previews and more info about what was going on during the development of games, courtesy of Colin, who often calls here when in Liverpool.

Did you ever meet Raft Cecco or did you always work apart - I remember your interview with AA in which you said the stuff was just mailed to him.

Yes, that's right, I never actually met any of Hewson's programmers, although I once had a brief and not very chatty visit by Andrew Hewson.
Unfortunately, I can't travel to meet anyone myself, because I suffer from panic-disorder/agoraphobia. I hesitate to mention this, because public understanding of it is still in the dark ages, but believe me, it isn't as strange as it may sound, and it has very real physical effects.

What is your favourite tune that you wrote?

Netherworld, because of it's general weirdness. I was quite pleased with the middle bit, the way the 10-bar pattern looped. Most of my stuff contains bits like this, that depart from the bog standard multiples-of-four-bars that comprise 99% of popular music. You can probably blame this on my listening to Jethro Tull in the 60s :-) Other favourites are Zynaps (which, by the way, is not working properly on the Emulators!!! One channel is missing) and "Bear a Grudge", a Spectrum magazine covergame by Chris Wood.
My all-time _worst_ music was probably "G.l.Hero", but it was quite fitting really, a crappy tune for a crappy game. This one isn't working properly on the emulators either, but in this case I'm not bothered.

Are there any tunes you weren't that happy with or wish you had more time/memory to improve?

Almost all of them. In some cases I had extra sections of music ready to be added, which never made it. On the other hand, if it wasn't for deadlines I'd just go on fiddling forever and never actually finish anything. Left to my own devices I just accumulate discs full of half-finished ideas ... I'm sure a lot of Cubase users will know exactly what I mean ... "I'll come back to that one when I get a better sound module" ... "I'll save this bit, might make a good Intro for something", etc.

Did you have any other game musicians whose stuff you really liked?

I thought most of them did a good job and produced music that suited the purpose, and some of them were very prolific, much more so than myself. However, I have to admit that I didn't like most of it.
I remember there was one particular sound that everyone seemed to use that I really hated ... the "synth bass drum" (a sharply descending pitch sweep). I couldn't see the point of trying to simulate "real instruments" with the feeble Yamaha sound chip, which basically supplied you with three-beeps-and-a-hiss.
I thought it preferable to envelope the chip's outputs into whatever abstract shapes optimised the psychoacoustic illusion of a densely populated amplitude/time/frequency perceptional phase-space :-) Eh? Ask Richard Fairhurst, he explained it much better in comp.sys.amstrad.8bit :-)

Were there ever any games you wish you'd got to write the music for? Did you play games and be more critical, thinking the tune really didn't go with the game etc..

See previous answer.

You mention using Cubase nowadays to write tunes on and convert them to the computers. What did you use back in the 8bit days when cubase wasn't around?

The music was worked out on guitar or keyboard, and then entered into a compiler on the CPC. Notes were entered as octave/pitch/length, for example "3Ab4", which would mean third octave, A-flat, for four beats. Putting a letter on the end, e.g. "3Ab4s", would add different colours of white/pink noise, from "n" the thinnest to "z" the deepest. Along with the notes would be other mnemonics, things like "env3" (use envelope3), "key5" (transpose C to F), "tun5" (go and play sub-block 5), "kill" (end sound effect), and so on.
Once the basics had been entered, there would be lots of fiddling about with different arrangements, harmonies, etc, and I usually spent more time on this than anything else, so I put an option in the compiler to allow it to quickly recompile individual sections, so I could try out ideas very quickly, but at the expense of producing non-compacted data. The compiler had a slower "final mode" which would pack it all together.
The envelope format was very open-ended. An envelope could have as few or as many stages as you liked, and could be used for any purpose, pitch, volume or noise-frequency modulation. Parameters were entered as groups of three;- C1,S1,N1 ... Cn,Sn,Nn ... End Marker.
Where C = Countdown, S = Step-size (+ or -), N = Number of steps.

You write your own sound engines, did you write new one for each game or was each game containing a further evolution of the same engine?

It was more or less the same engine from Biospheres right through to Deliverance, and yes, it did evolve quite a bit, with each new version having at least a few tweaks. The compiler went through a similar series of tweakings.
Exactly the same engine and data were used for the Spectrum 128k, the only differences being the write-to-sound-chip routine and a couple of lines to adjust pitches to compensate for the different clock rates. It was moved over to the Spec by using CPC/+3 disk compatibility.
For the 48k Spec I sometimes did a separate driver and sometimes a completely different tune, e.g. Cybernoid, but when I could get away with it I just used the CPC driver, with all three channels, envelopes, the whole lot, plus an extra bit of code stuck on the end to boil it all down to a mono "beep"! A terribly inefficient and lazy solution I admit, but anything to avoid spending time on a 48k Spectrum.
For the Atari S.T., again it was the same engine, converted more or less instruction-by-instruction.
Everything revolved around the CPC, with the ST and Speccy getting it all second-hand as it were, which I reckon is only fair and befitting of their status as lesser computers :)
Later on, with the Code Monkeys, all the drivers, voice editors and the odd bit of reverse engineering were combined efforts, mostly with Colin again.

What happened to Hewson? When did you leave them?

The last I heard of them was in March 91, when a solicitors letter arrived to say that they'd gone into receivership. They didn't owe me anything, so I ignored it, but I heard rumours that another programmer wasn't so fortunate (allegedly). I thought that some of the products Hewson was releasing towards the end were a real let-down after the likes of Raff's stuff. You could tell that the end was nigh.

What have you been doing since we last heard of you (Deliverance for me), are you still involved with the games industry?

After Deliverance, I was lined up to do a few more (Astaroth, Eliminator ...) but I'd had enough, so I took a break. After that, I returned to working with Colin Hogg, who in the meantime had moved to Leeds and set up the Code Monkeys.
During this period I did mostly Sega Megadrive and Gameboy ... games such as Turrican, Onslaught and Universal Soldier. The music was roughly 70% conversions / 30% original, and sometimes I teamed up with fellow musician Paul Kenny.
The music was all done on Cubase, running on an ST, then the Midi files were converted to our driver format (mostly for the sake of compression, midi data is full of redundancy) and it was ported over. Then came the FM voicing but this is supposed to be 8bit nostalgia, so I'll stop here.

You don't happen to have a list of all the stuff you've done do you?

No, but I'll do you one ...

ZX81 type-in programs, 1984/85, in "ZX Computing" and "My Computer" magazines, mostly co-authored with Colin Hogg;-

Mad Miner.
Flatman.
Hi Rise Hive.
Bugburst.
Compac.
Pinbat.
Moneygrabber.

Odds and ends;-

Chordata (Spectrum).	A rule-based guitar chord finder, which worked out fingerings from any input chord name.
Flee (Dragon 32).	Pacman clone (co-author C.Hogg).
DW8000 midi manager. (ST Club / Club Cubase U.K.).

CPC Games (co-author C.Hogg);-

The Scout Steps Out. (Amsoft)
Radzone. (Mastertronic)
Biospheres. (Firebird)

Music, Hewson games;-

Zynaps.	CPC / Atari ST
Exolon.	ST
Ranarama.	ST
Uridium.	CPC
Anarchy.	CPC
Cybernoid.	CPC/Spec
Nebulus.	CPC
Battle Valley.	CPC/Spec
Marauder.	CPC/Spec
Herobotix.	CPC
Cybernoid 2.	CPC/Spec
Netherworld.	CPC/Spec
Stormlord.	CPC/Spec
Deliverance.	CPC/Spec

Music, non-Hewson

Turbo Boat Simulator (Probe, Silverbird).	CPC / Spec
G.I. Hero (Probe, Firebird).	CPC/Spec
Bear-A-Grudge (Covertape game, Sinclair User Tape 9).	Spec

Music, Code Monkeys

Meanstreets (U.S Gold / Access).	Atari ST / Amiga
Turrican (Accolade).	Megadrive / Genesis / Gameboy / PC Engine / Turbo Grafx16
Centipede (Accolade).	Gameboy
Missile Command (Accolade).	Gameboy
Universal Soldier (Accolade). With Paul Kenny.	Megadrive/Genesis/Gameboy
Onslaught (Accolade).	Megadrive
Arcade Classic 1 (Accolade).	Gameboy
Arcade Classic 2 (Accolade).	Gameboy / Super-Gameboy

Today (1998) I'm completely out of touch with games programming. As I said at the beginning, I only got into it by accident, and I always felt a bit out on the edge, certainly not a mainstream coder like Colin, who will tell you that I used to oscillate between bursts of enthusiasm and wanting to give it all up!

Currently, I'm interested in a.i., artificial life, neural nets, etc. I like the idea that programmers of the future will be more like "digital farmers", using genetic programming to grow and evolve code rather than having to construct it by hand in all it's tedious detail. I'm on the "strong a.i." side, so I'm betting on the emergence of true artificial intelligence, machine consciousness and artificial lifeforms.
I just wish the currently projected timescale was a bit shorter.
20 years? 30? 42?
Will they take over the planet?
Will they find the ultimate answer?
Will they think of the CPC as one of their distant ancestors?
What sort of music will they make?
Answers please on the back of an e-mail to davejdr@mersinet.co.uk.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the creators and maintainers of the CPC Emulators, and all those who support them with web pages, etc. for keeping the CPC alive.

Dave Rogers. 1998.