In August 1987 Your Sinclair gave its readers a type-in listing that made a 48K Spectrum play three-part music through a speaker that can only be switched on or off. The magazine called it “this amazing three-channel sound routine”. Its author was Tim Follin, still a teenager, “the man behind the tunes on Mastertronic’s Agent X, and Firebird’s spectacular Sentinel”. Within a few years he was writing for the Commodore 64, the Amiga and Nintendo’s consoles, and reviewers kept saying the same thing about his work: the music was better than the game it came with.
Mike’s little brother
Follin came into games through his family. He was the youngest of three brothers: Mike was a Spectrum programmer, and Geoff also wrote music. Tim told Super Play in 1996 how it began: “My brother Mike was already in the computer industry, writing a Spectrum game called Star Firebirds.” Tim had been playing with a machine-code sound routine. Asked whether it could play tunes, “I tried, they could, and the tune went into the game.” A three-channel routine followed, and with it the music for Mike’s next game for Insight, Vectron. That was before he left school. After what he called “an enjoyable but aimless year at music college”, Software Creations, the Manchester company Mike was working for, then in “a cramped office above a computer shop”, offered him a job writing music.
Vectron already got players’ attention. CRASH rated its sound “fab — great when amplified” in January 1986, and a reader wrote in a year later asking why every game could not have tunes like Ping Pong and Vectron.
Chords from one bit
The Your Sinclair routine is the best record of how Follin’s beeper music worked, because the magazine printed all of it. It is 1,340 bytes long and loads at address 40000. Its first instruction switches off the interrupts, so nothing can disturb its timing.
The routine does not mix waveforms. It keeps a countdown for each of three voices, and every pass through its loop subtracts one from each. When a voice’s count reaches zero, the routine sends a single short pulse to the speaker, holding bit 4 of port $FE low for C delay loops and then high for 16−C, so every pulse takes the same time. Then it reloads that voice’s count with the voice’s current pitch. A voice with a small count pulses often and sounds high; one with a large count pulses rarely and sounds low. The three streams of pulses share the one speaker, and the ear hears three notes.
The pulse width C gives the notes their shape. A narrow pulse sounds quieter than a wide one, and the routine widens and then narrows C as each note plays, so notes swell and fade. The beeper music entry works through the loop instruction by instruction.
The listing’s blurb said Follin was already “working on a brilliant new routine for 6 channel sound with chorus bass, 128K snare drum, echo on/off/delay time, portamento, and full ADSR!” A reader wrote in to say the routine “was a joy to hear”. In his 1996 Super Play profile, Follin listed a “five-channel sound routine” among his Spectrum work, used for Agent X, Chronos and The Sentinel.
What the reviewers heard
Follin’s beeper tunes played over title and menu screens: a beeper routine keeps the processor busy for as long as the music plays, and Retro Gamer later called his “processor hungry”. Reviewers still noticed them, and not always for the same reasons.
- Agent X (Mastertronic, 1987, £1.99). CRASH gave it 85% in February 1987 and singled out the music: “The sound is the best feature. The title music is without doubt amongst the best 48K music around.”
- The Sentinel (Firebird, 1987). Mike wrote the Spectrum version. CRASH found its “sound effects and tunettes are of a high standard, but it’s a shame that there aren’t a few more.”
- Chronos (Mastertronic, 1987). CRASH was unmoved. One reviewer heard only “a strange bit of title sound (rather than music)”, and the verdict box said “average ‘effects’ music”. The game got 55%.
- Agent X II (Mastertronic, 1988). Your Sinclair found that, like Software Creations’ Agent X and Chronos before it, the game “looks and sounds marvellous (a good tune by Tim Follin) but falls down on gameplay”.
The 128K Spectrum
The Spectrum 128 added an AY-3-8912 sound chip, which plays three channels by itself and leaves the processor free, and Follin’s music on it could play during the game. His 128K soundtracks drew the strongest reactions of his Spectrum career.
Sinclair User credited “Tim Follin (brother of Mike)” with the music for Software Creations’ Bubble Bobble (Firebird, 1987) and was torn about it: “a cute soundtrack that you’ll enjoy for about two minutes, and then turn off in exasperation. Very clever it is, but also incredibly infuriating.” CRASH liked it better: “The continuous tune on the 128 version matches the frantic action of the game.”
Bionic Commando (GO!, 1988) went further. On a 48K machine it had “just sound effects”. On a 128, one CRASH reviewer called it “the best music I’ve ever heard on the Spectrum”, a “psychedelic 128K tune” that was “different for every level”. The same issue praised “Tim Follin’s 128K music” on Psycho Pig UXB: it “really gets the foot tapping”.
The trade-offs show in Sinclair User’s 1989 account of how Software Creations built Spectrum Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts, programmed by Mike “with music and sound effects by Tim Follin and additional sounds by Geoff Follin”. The game’s scrolling tied up the processor so completely that music could only have been played at 25 updates a second. “Rather than have sub-standard music”, the team used three-channel sound effects during play and kept “high quality 50Hz music” for the menu screens.
Commodore 64 and Amiga
At Software Creations Follin wrote his own music drivers for the C64 and the Amiga as well as the music itself. His name did not always appear in the reviews, but the scores did. ZZAP!64 gave the C64 Bionic Commando 97% for sound in July 1988: “Five superbly psychedelic in-game themes, a brilliantly funky title tune but no spot effects.” ZZAP! gave LED Storm 94%, with praise for its “really brilliant soundtrack”, and when the game came back on a budget label in 1991 ZZAP! judged the music “merely good by his standard but still brilliant for almost anyone else”.
Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts (US Gold, 1989) was the high point of this period. Reviewing the C64 version at 96%, ZZAP! said “the soundtrack, and FX, are simply out of this world with some beautifully produced music urging you on.” On the Amiga, the same magazine thought the game less impressive than the C64 one, except for “the gorgeous soundtrack. Tim Follin has provided three excellent, atmospheric in-game tunes plus a brilliant ‘folk rock’ title tune.” In 1990 ZZAP!’s readers voted Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts to the top of their C64 music chart.
The Amiga music was not easy to write. Amiga Action, visiting Software Creations in late 1989, explained that the arcade game used a dedicated Yamaha sound chip with a different tune for every level, and Follin had to squeeze it into the Amiga’s memory. After a couple of weeks’ work it was “shaping up well”, he said, “with absolutely no thanks to the Amiga”. Asked in the same issue for advice to would-be game musicians, he offered: “Listen to real music and write that instead.”
He later told Super Play that the C64 had influenced him more than the newer machines, “probably because the [sound] it made was so unrecognisable in real music terms that there was no pressure to mimic outside music”.
Nintendo consoles
Software Creations turned to Nintendo’s consoles, and Follin went with it. His Super Play discography lists music drivers and scores for Solstice, Target Renegade and Silver Surfer on the NES, and Equinox, Spider-Man and the X-Men and Plok! on the SNES, with Plok! written jointly with Geoff. Nintendo Power thought the Equinox soundtrack “one of the best this reviewer has heard. Play this one in stereo,” and said Plok! “has one of the best music tracks in video games”.
None of it was composed on a keyboard. Follin told Super Play that he and his collaborators wrote SNES music by typing numbers for each note’s pitch and length into a PC assembler, and kept to that method up to their last project. His verdict: “Never again!” He was not sentimental about the hardware either: “I actually hate all videogame machines.”
Later work
By December 1994 Follin had left Software Creations for Malibu Interactive in Warrington, where he wrote a music driver and music for Time Trax on the Mega Drive and was producing CD soundtracks for the Mega CD. He told Edge: “I never want to write chip-generated music again if I can help it.” He wanted to make films. In 2000 Edge found him freelancing, having just scored Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future on the Dreamcast, and still wary of how chip music is judged. “Unless you knew the limitations, which only people absorbed into the ‘scene’ did, the creativity really didn’t mean a whole lot,” he said. “You didn’t — and don’t — listen to chip music with objective ears.”
According to public reference works, he stopped composing for games in the mid-2000s and later returned as the designer and composer of the video game Contradiction (2015).
Players did not forget the Spectrum work. In 1993 Your Sinclair reviewed a scene demo that had borrowed “a really fab echoey-whistley Tim Follin soundtrack” to play under its scrollers.
Sources
- Your Sinclair, issue 20, August 1987: Program Pitstop, Tim Follin’s three-channel routine with its hex dump, and the promised six-channel routine.
- Your Sinclair, issue 23, November 1987: reader’s letter on the routine.
- Super Play, issue 43, May 1996: interview with Tim Follin (Star Firebirds, Vectron, music college, Software Creations, the C64, SNES composing, “I actually hate all videogame machines”), with a discography sidebar and a caption on Plok!.
- CRASH, issue 24, January 1986: Vectron review. Issue 37, February 1987, p. 42: Frank Bouts’s letter on Ping Pong and Vectron.
- CRASH, issue 37, February 1987, p. 117: Agent X review.
- CRASH, issue 40, May 1987: The Sentinel review.
- CRASH, issue 41, June 1987, p. 21: Chronos review.
- Your Sinclair, issue 25, January 1988: Agent X II review.
- Sinclair User, issue 68, November 1987: Bubble Bobble review and programmer credits.
- CRASH, issue 45, October 1987, p. 132: Bubble Bobble review.
- CRASH, issue 53, June 1988, pp. 18–19: Bionic Commando review; p. 96: Psycho Pig UXB review.
- CRASH, issue 59, Christmas 1988: profile of Mike Follin (Vectron, The Sentinel, Bubble Bobble, Bionic Commando, LED Storm).
- Sinclair User, issue 92, November 1989: how Spectrum Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts was made, with credits.
- ZZAP!64, issue 39, July 1988, pp. 12–13: C64 Bionic Commando review.
- ZZAP!, issue 75, July 1991: LED Storm budget re-review, quoting the original review.
- ZZAP!, issue 57, January 1990: C64 Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts review. Issue 58, February 1990: Amiga Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts review.
- ZZAP!, issues 63 and 64, July and August 1990: readers’ music charts.
- Amiga Action, issue 3, December 1989: Software Creations and the Amiga Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts; Follin’s profile and answers in the musicians’ round-up.
- Nintendo Power, issue 39, August 1992: Equinox review. Issue 51, August 1993: Plok! review.
- Edge, issue 15, December 1994: profile of Tim Follin.
- Edge, issue 92, Christmas 2000: profile of Tim Follin.
- Your Sinclair, issue 88, April 1993: demo review.
- Retro Gamer, issue 9 (2004), Spectrum sound feature: Follin’s beeper arrangements were “processor hungry” and played over static menu screens.
- Wikipedia, “Tim Follin” (web, secondary): date and place of birth, his brothers, Contradiction and his later career.