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