Neil Baldwin composed NES music by working out tunes on a keyboard and typing their pitches and lengths into an assembler. Writing the music also meant developing the software that played it. Years later, his NTRQ tracker put an editor on the console, so musicians could change notes and hear the results there.
From the C64 to Eurocom
Baldwin grew up in north-west England and learned guitar from his father. In an interview with Audun Sorlie, he recalled discovering Rob Hubbard’s Commodore 64 music and investigating how it worked. Shadow Skimmer became his first commercial music project. He also used the name Demon in the C64 scene.
He helped establish Eurocom with people he knew through that scene. In the same interview, he credited Tim Rogers with helping him develop his programming. This was shared work by a small team, rather than a composer delivering recordings to a separate audio department.
Music as software
Eurocom’s first game was Magician. Baldwin’s retrospective describes building its NES music driver with Rogers, then entering music numerically. Macros later made those commands easier to read and write. They gave names to operations in the source; the assembled driver and music data were what the console used during play.
For James Bond Jr., he described fitting quiet, delayed repetitions into the gaps between melody notes to suggest an echo using one voice. It worked better with busy passages than with sustained notes. The game’s programmer, Chris Shrigley, dates its release to 1992, distinguishing it from the earlier development work.
The NES Hero Quest was cancelled. Baldwin later found listeners discussing its music after the game circulated online. Shrigley’s archive identifies it as an unreleased project and offers its source for educational, non-commercial use.
Composing on the console
NTRQ is a tracker: notes and commands are entered into patterns, then arranged into a song. Its manual describes five tracks and separate editors for patterns, instruments and arrangement. The controller moves between those editors and changes their values.
A NES needs a suitable cartridge, such as a PowerPak, to run NTRQ and store songs. The same program also runs in an emulator, and save files can move between the two. The manual explains the saving procedure because leaving the editor does not by itself guarantee that a cartridge has saved the work.
Nijuu takes another approach. The composer writes music in text files and uses the ASM6 assembler to produce a NES program or an NSF music file. Its manual describes a design aimed at making composition flexible, with substantial memory and processor costs; it is not presented as an automatically suitable game engine.
Later tools
Baldwin’s archive also includes Pulsar, a tracker influenced by the Game Boy tool LSDJ, and PR8, a drum-machine-style synthesiser. It preserves releases and manuals, rather than promising that every project remains under active development.
His later work extends beyond Nintendo hardware. VOLDRED uses TouchOSC to edit Korg’s Volca Drum, with controls for changing sounds, copying parts and storing kits. Baldwin’s current project site also lists a TouchOSC editor for the 2020 beat-making application and a graph editor for Cycling ’74’s Max.
Sources
- Audun Sorlie, Neil Baldwin interview, 2009; Japanese translation published by SID Media Lab, 17 October 2013 — primary testimony in translation: upbringing, C64 work and Eurocom.
- Neil Baldwin, Duty Cycle Generator, 2009 posts, preserved site — primary recollections: Magician, James Bond Jr., Hero Quest and music-entry methods. Project/copyright years are not treated as release dates.
- Chris Shrigley, Source Code Archive — primary developer account: Eurocom’s first game, James Bond Jr.’s 1992 release and the unreleased Hero Quest.
- Neil Baldwin, NTRQ manual, pp. 12–13, 15, 17–25 and 30–32 — primary software documentation: operation, emulator support and storage.
- Neil Baldwin, Nijuu manual — primary documentation: text workflow, output files and resource trade-offs.
- Neil Baldwin, NES Audio Tools archive — primary project descriptions and downloads.
- Neil Baldwin, current projects and VOLDRED documentation — primary records of later audio tools.