Today marks the 40th anniversary of “Synth Sample”, the first production that my best buddy Frank “Antiware” Lemmen and me (“Cronos” of the ACC – Amazing Cracking Conspiracy) ever made on the Atari ST. This was back in the day when I only had a monochrome monitor (early Atari adopters will relate) and preciously little software to play with. We had “Degas” (a drawing program) and plenty of time on our hands, so Frank and me set to making a bunch of pictures (some of them not too bad, even if I say so myself) and then used the “N-Vision” slideshow program to show them with background music. The background music was made using Activision’s “Music Studio”, though none of them by ourselves.

The name came from a bunch of programs on the Commodore 64, where musicians (or sometimes music rippers like Frank and myself) created little compilations of tunes. Usually, those tunes were ripped from games (and also sometimes sent by musicians themselves), and then spread among software swapping contacts. The C64 had many games that were quite naff, but had good music (“Knuckle Busters”, anyone?). So if you took the music out you could listen to it without having to play the game. Sometimes the games were so difficult that you couldn’t even hear the whole tunes (“The Last V8”, anyone?). We weren’t really good demo coders, so it was more about the music than about any, shall we say, visual effects. The ACC later released other “Synth Sample” titles on the Atari ST, but by then mainly on colour monitors.

To those of you who have never owned an Atari ST, all this talk of monochrome and colour monitors certainly sounds odd. A short explanation might be in order. Well, 40 years ago you didn’t have limitless colours and huge screen resolutions at 100 Hz. Some monitors had a certain number pixels and a certain refresh rate at the cost of the number of colours. In the case of the Atari ST this meant 640×400 pixels at 71.25 Hz in black and white (on the monochrome monitor) and two resolutions with more colours, of which the most popular was 320×200 at 50 or 60 Hz with 32 colours (on the colour monitor). These days, an Apple watch has a resolution of 410×502 pixels… Anyway, many Atari ST owners used to have two clunky monitors on their desks, because some stuff only worked on 640×400 whereas practically all games only worked on 320×200…

If you are in a mood to be underwhelmed, check the CODEF version of “Synth Sample” by clicking here (press N to go to the next tune). You can download an image here (for use in an emulator) and the real deal as a ZIP file here (for real Atari ST hardware),

CODEF, by the way, is the Canvas Oldskool Demo Effect Framework, that allows you to create even way more cooler and advanced demo effects using the HTML5 Canvas object – the last and most ‘advanced’ one I ever made, “Out of Bounds”, can be seen here (with Commodore 64 tunes and some nice demo effects).