Synaptic Distorion Music Disk One
Coding
Coded from Oct 26.2012 -> Feb 2-2013 using Dark Basic Pro. Graphics created with Adobe Photoshop.
Since I got into the demo scene back in the mid 1980s I’ve always wanted to make a music disk. Unfortunately other interests came up and it never happened. When I got back into coding in early 2011 I decided that a music disk was going to be one of my first projects. Due to lack of time I didn’t end up working on much coding until late 2012. How time flies eh? None the less… Here it is. A music disk using tunes from my good buddy Darren Maunu, AKA Synaptic Distortion. It’s a simple concept for a program, no 3D stuff but I’m very happy with it for my first attempt at something like this. Future versions will have fancy animations and mouse driven menus. (Edit: Fancy graphics added for final version v2.) I’ve learned a great deal about how Dark Basic works coding this little demo and had a lot of fun doing it. The knowledge will be a huge help in future projects.
I’ve known Darren since the early 1990s. He used to help me out on my BBS (Bulletin Board Sytem), the Ash Ock Underground (AOU) and has been doing onsite tech work for my business (VAM Computers) for the last 10 or so years. He’s a great guy and one heck of an electronic musician. The first song of his that I heard in 1995 was a .mod file called “Planet Earth”. It’s still in my regular song rotations as are many of his more recent tunes. I keep hoping that his talent will get noticed by someone and he’ll make some money doing this little hobby that he loves so much and that he’s so good at.
Version 1 of the program was released Nov 28.2012. Version 2 was released Feb 2.2013 and includes a large number of code optimizations, many more play features (Pause, loop, Random), a volume slider, better front end menu and better graphics effects on the main menu and on the credits page. In the end this came out to 830 lines of code.
Huge thanks must go out to Polaris of the Northern Dragons for suggesting Dark Basic to me and to Xan for all of her love, support and suggestions on this project.
