Hire Me

Synth Sample found again!

Mickey · · 3 min read

For more than 20 years I’ve been looking for our TGM-Crew demo disk Synth Sample. I had pretty much given up hope of ever seeing the complete thing again. On my AMIGA page and module archive I even wrote that the disk had been lost, with only an excerpt from a compilation surviving. Well, it’s back! Many thanx to Exciter for telling me! :)

The disk image contains the full demo, including the dancing character and six pieces of music. Seeing it run again after all this time is quite something. The scroll text dates the release to May 25, 1988. Back then I was “Lord Performer Artworx”, responsible for code and music, while Dennis “Exolon” Schirmer did the graphics.

Synth Sample loading screen with the TGM-Crew logo and Lord Performer Artworx credit
The loading screen. I hadn't seen this one in a long time.

The dancer was our little trick. We wanted a character made from 3D lines, but didn’t know enough 3D maths to animate one. Dennis drew lots of individual frames instead, and I played them back in sequence. Add a shadow, a star field, copper bars, a scroller, and music, and there you have it. Some other groups were impressed until they figured out how we’d done it ;)

The dancing line figure and its shadow below the TGM-Crew logo, with a scrolling message at the bottom
Our dancer, back on screen.

Getting it to run took a bit of work: the disk loads, but an address in the original code caused trouble with the Kickstart 1.3 ROM used in the emulator. A small change to a working copy of the disk image got us past that. The original image remains untouched. The demo’s scroll text explains that you can choose the tunes with F1 through F6.

You can watch a recording of Synth Sample on YouTube. It includes the opening sequence and all six tune selections; some tracks are cut short when the next one is selected.

The music was an even bigger surprise. I compared the six pieces with my existing module archive. Five don’t appear to be in there at all. The sixth, “Les Cambrioleurs”, is the demo version of “The Thieves”, which I did have, but with different samples and some differences in the song data. And the original “Thinking” is back too — previously I only had “Thinking ’89”.

I’ve extracted all six pieces from the disk as 15-instrument SoundTracker modules. You can download them here:

The dancer in another pose above a colorful scrolling message
Another frame from the demo, with the scroller running below.

The disk stores sample data separately from the song headers and patterns, so the modules had to be reconstructed rather than simply copied out as files. Back then I did that as a kind of “copy protection”, hoping to stop hackers from simply ripping off my songs :D They open in a module player, although you may need one that supports the older 15-instrument format.

If you still have any old TGM-Crew disks or other pieces of my Amiga work, please let me know — who knows what else might turn up?

Cheers, :M: