WHY? - A LITTLE HISTORY
These playlists represent a major undertaking by me, for sentimental,
nostalgic, and even for historical reasons.
I've had a C64 almost since the beginning. As more and more great sounding
game tunes appeared in Commodore-64 games and demos, I decided to capture them
for good, as I didn't want to see them vanish, and also, because I wanted to
enjoy them in the background while studying, playing, etc. Since all that I had
in those times for this purpose was a tape recorder, I started to record the
game tunes on them.
My C64 audio tape collection grew and grew over the following years, and
eventually it became to contain over 20 tapes worth of C64 music. I was and I
still am quite proud of the material they contained or still contain.
However, the sad date of October 6th, 1991 came when I had to sell my
Commodore-64 machine and all the tapes and disks I've collected over the many
years. In case you wonder why, it was because my parents, my brother, and I
decided to immigrate to the US from Hungary, and we simply couldn't carry
absolutely everything with ourselves - and also because we needed every penny
we could get. Unfortunately, my beloved C-64 was a victim of this. I am still
kicking myself in the butt for selling everything - I wish I've never done it.
Although my C-64 machine was gone, my cherished audio tapes were still there
and they traveled with me to the US. So, although I could not play the C-64
games any more, I could still listen to the tunes they contained - which,
believe it or not, was actually more important for me as I found it out.
A few years later I bumped into
SIDPlay and the
HVSC archive on the Net. You
can imagine how delighted I was to see that other people shared my enthusiasm
towards C64 music and they have also tried to preserve it - just like I tried
to do it with my audio tapes.
When SIDPlay/Win started to support playlists, I had the idea of
"converting" my audio tapes to SIDPlay playlists so other people can share the
joy I always had when listening to the masters of the SID chip. I also wanted
to do this to better understand which tunes were created by whom, as sometimes
I recorded the tunes from demos, which didn't always give proper credits to the
composers.
And so, here they are! Some of my tapes got lost over the years, some got
overrecorded (yeah, yeah, I know - dumb!), but the list of tunes they contained
got preserved in one way or another and are now contained in these playlists.
It took me quite some time to compile these playlists and I took special care
to make sure that the length of each tune is correct, so the work represented
by these playlists is significant. But, I hope you'll have as much fun
listening to them as I had compiling them.
If you have any comments about them, or you find problems with them, let me
know!
Enjoy!
