Make Music at the Command Line on a Commodore C64


Developer Linus Åkesson, creator of the Commodordion 8-Bit Commodore 64 accordion synthesizer, shared this video, demonstrating live coding for music on the Commodore 64. After demonstrating C64 command-line music coding, he wraps things up with a chiptune jam.

Video Summary:

“In this video, I make 8-bit SID music on a Commodore 64 without any software apart from the built-in BASIC interpreter. This involves poking numbers into memory and hardware registers and writing machine code in decimal.”


Topics covered in the video:

0:00 Introduction

1:57 Groundwork

8:50 Time and pitch

13:23 Interactive editor

17:11 Note on/off subroutines

23:14 Making a pattern

27:06 Varying the instruments

31:05 Drum hack

32:00 Final jam

Are you making music with the Commodore 64 or other vintage computers? If so, share the details in the comments!


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