Catacomb Dread - Catacomb Tapes - Atari 7800 dark synth (POKEY + TIA)

Catacomb Dread, from Catacomb Tapes: dark synth tracks for the Atari 7800, each with its own looping animation. Music by Abysmal Games. A hooded lantern-bearer walks down a spiral stair round a stone pillar in a narrow shaft, and the stair never ends: it turns past him like a screw, in front, out to the side, behind the pillar where only his light shows, and back again. The walls close in on every heartbeat, and faint red eyes open in a skull niche and blink shut. Slow and still. F minor, 66.6 BPM, 2:09.7 a pass. How it's done: the picture is driven by the music's frame counter, never a timer: one step on every beat, the walls breathing on the lub-dub, the glow from below swelling on the held notes. The loop is a whole number of bars (4 bars = 16 steps = one turn round the pillar, the 36-bar track exactly 9 of them), so the track and the picture meet at the same seam and it plays forever. Maria, the 7800's graphics chip, draws a new picture every frame, 60 a second. The video shows one full pass and a few seconds into the next. Hardware: POKEY at $450 plus the console's own TIA, on a 7800 GameDrive, Concerto or a POKEY cartridge. Recorded in the test7800 emulator (NTSC); the picture and sound are the cartridge's own. Listen and download (MP3) in the 7800 jukebox: https://www.abysmal-games.com/games/a... #Atari7800 #darksynth #POKEY #chiptune #homebrew #retrogaming #CatacombTapes