Masic
| Masic | |
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| Creator | T. Decker |
| Released | 1987-??-?? |
| Platform | Atari 8-bit |
Masic is a German music editor. It was published by Verlag Rätz-Eberle at a suggested retail price of 49 DM. As of April 2024, the editor and manual are not online, but reviews from 1987 are, and the driver is used and named in a few demos.
You enter notes like a program with up to 101 labels. At any time in-song, you can set all POKEY registers, choose your own envelopes for volume, optionally pitch, and change the tempo. Masic supports dotted notes down to 1/32, though tuplets require a bit of math. Further features are transpose, glissando, reverb, and auto chord.
Programmed in Action!, the driver is intended to run in the background of your own programs. As it does, it also hides an easter egg. The easiest trigger is:
- Run a game like Chromatics (A8).
- Press 5.
- Hold the OPTION, SELECT, and START keys for about a second.
- Hold SELECT and press j and 5 alternately and slowly 17 times, about one key per second. Don't press other keys, or go back to step 2.
- The background flashes, and the actual game and song pause.
- Press START to resume normal action.
Instead of j and 5, the author of Masic likely wanted to enter a password to see if anybody does use Masic. That password cannot be reconstructed, but everything goes if it has 17 characters, none twice in a row, and the sum of its Atari keyboard codes modulo 256 equals 241.
Picture Gallery
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