The remaster: a bridge, two bands, and a real modem

Adds the cel-shaded skin, the score and the sound, and puts the skin
machinery back so the toggle under the frame has somewhere to go.

The remaster is a bridge rather than a paper column: the ship down the left
as meters and pips, a cel-shaded sensor grid in the middle, the log down the
right. Both panels are devices -- break the short range sensors and the
sector grid goes dark, break the computer and the chart does, and the chart
draws what has been scanned rather than the galaxy as it is. Scans are drawn
instead of printed, so the log gets the sentences and stops being eight rows
of ASCII squeezed into a strip.

One theme, two arrangements, so switching skin re-scores the piece rather
than changing the record: brass, strings and timpani for the remaster, the
same eight bars as a three-channel chiptune for 1971. Written in the idiom
rather than quoted from it, for the same reason the game is not called what
you expect -- NOTICE.md now argues both. Effects are the ship's: warp, beams,
torpedo, hit, explode, klaxon, dock, and the print head on paper only.

The boot dials in for real: Bell 103 at the real frequencies, which is what a
110-baud acoustic coupler sounded like and not the modem noise everybody
remembers. The synth engine is the siblings', unforked.

Tests cover the music the only way a test can: a mistyped note name does not
throw, it silently removes a voice, so every step of every track is checked
against the parser.
This commit is contained in:
2026-09-08 23:45:25 -07:00
parent 593bbd888f
commit d623315517
20 changed files with 2627 additions and 79 deletions
+30 -2
View File
@@ -60,8 +60,15 @@ licence below meaningful:
a repair takes — these are in `src/game/constants.ts`, each with the
reasoning next to it, and the places where a judgement call was needed are
marked as judgement calls.
- **The artwork is ours.** There are no imported assets of any kind. The one
drawing in the repository is `public/favicon.svg`, which is a scan grid.
- **The artwork and the music are ours.** There are no imported assets of any
kind. Every mark on the remaster's sensors is SVG generated from the game
state in `src/components/TacticalView.tsx`, and every note is generated by
the synth in `src/audio/`. The only drawing in the repository is
`public/favicon.svg`, which is a scan grid.
- **The synth is shared with its siblings.** `src/audio/synth.ts` is the same
engine as the one in [lemonade](https://github.com/Coffey-Labs/lemonade) and
[wumpus](https://github.com/Coffey-Labs/wumpus) -- same author, same
licence. What is written for it here is new.
## The words on screen are ours, deliberately
@@ -88,6 +95,27 @@ Two things are not original, and neither is a copyright question:
own, and changing it would break the one piece of shared literacy this
genre has.
## The music is ours too, and this is the same argument
The score is not the television theme, or any part of it, or a paraphrase of
one. It would be a strange sort of care to rename the enemy and then quote
sixteen bars of somebody's music. Every note in `src/audio/deepspace.ts` and
`src/audio/tunes.ts` was written for this project.
What it borrows is the idiom, which belongs to nobody: brass in a major key,
a melody built on rising fourths and fifths that holds its top note longer
than a pop tune would dare, strings moving one chord a bar, timpani. That is
how film and television have said "space, and it matters" since the 1950s,
and it is older than any of them -- it is Holst, and before him Wagner.
Nobody owns a perfect fifth.
The 1971 skin plays the same theme as a three-channel chiptune, which is a
claim about history rather than about the original: the game itself was
silent, played on a printing terminal whose only instrument was its own print
head. What the chiptune represents is the port it would have got when the
listing followed everybody home, and `tunes.ts` says so at the top rather
than leaving it to be assumed.
## One rule that is ours
The original ends when the clock does. So does this. What is new is the