Commodore Remix

One of the great forgotten games, FIRETRACK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bxdd2_qrpg.

I can't believe how similar it is to the Commodore 64 version. It moves the same, looks very close and even the music sounds very similar too. The BBC Micro games I usually saw were very basic in sound and colour scheme, lacked texture, flickered a bit and were usually quite staid. I'd say that the BBC seemed to fit somewhere between the Spectrum and Commodore in terms of what it could do.

But I liked the BBC Micro, paticularly as there seemed to be a few in virtually every school, and one thing I liked about the BBC over the Commodore was that its BASIC was easy to program with. Oh, and the build quality was better.

And I'll leave you with the Dr. Who theme on the BBC: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqU0uC_yGCI. I know that there were MIDI sequencing programs for the BBC and thanks to its ultra-reliability the machine could be trusted with virtually anything. So I wouldn't be surprised if somebody had written a MIDI player for the Beeb.

Firetrack was written on the BBC Micro first and then converted to the C64 by its author Nick Pelling (aka Orlando Q Pilchard)

At the recent Console Combat event there was a BBC fitted with a SID chip...

Fancy! I'm still impressed because my angle is that Firetrack is a lot more polished compared to the usual Beeb offerings. Much more like the C64.

Another nod to the C64 world from the Beebies: http://www.stairwaytohell.com/music/sidsnmidis.html

Evidence of BBC MIDI, though no MIDI synth software as far as i can see (though the closest would have been the AMPLE system):
http://bbcmicro.net/old-8bs/seemisc.htm
http://www.ditdotdat.org/bigcity/2008/0 ... nt-page-1/
http://www.colinfraser.com/m5000/m5000.htm

..and so on. Not surprisngly the BBC Radiophonic Workshop was fully kitted out with the latest music gear for the machine.

BBC Master with Sid chip.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KufZAu5Ioc

Well they do say that imitation's the best form of flattery. Pity the Beeb didn't have something like the SID in it because it was a solid, reliable, popular low maintainance machine as used by the BBC.

Maybe, just perhaps, it would then have been a fairly commonplace recording studio tool predating the ST (if Acorn had pushed any MIDI hardware with it).