Sequencer Kit is a music driver and music contruction kit for the
Atari 2600 game console.
Traditionally Atari 2600 games did not have much music aside from a few out-of-tune riffs due to the system
only having two voices, 5-bit pitch, and a minuscule 128 bytes of RAM. But I discovered some ways to produce
good music using the existing sound chip while only using a tiny amount of RAM and CPU cycles, allowing
the driver can easily be integrated into most homebrew games. I even integrated the music driver
into some of Atari's original games.
Sequencer Kit songs are created by editing music data
in a text file to create patterns and a pattern list, then the music data is assembled into
an Atari 2600 ROM that will run on 2600 emulators or a real
Atari 2600.
Unlike Pitfall 2's music,
Sequencer Kit does not require any special cartridge hardware to operate.
Atari 2600 music programming can be a bit challenging, so I've written
an Atari 2600 sound and music programmer's guide which covers almost
everything I know on the topic. It includes three
useful sets of in-tune notes to help overcome the 2600's very limited
pitch.
If you are a musician and develop songs or backing tracks using
the sequencer, you can have an actual cartridge made
of your sequences by sending the ROM image to
Atariage.
