[talideon]

I'm not sure about Ocean, but a lot of companies used the Tatung Einstein, itself a 64KiB machine, as a development platform. I would assume that the software used for building this stuff was able to deal with source files larger than the machine can hold. They might've moved onto the likes of Atari STs, IBM-compatibles, and Amigas by the time Wizball was released though.

Plenty of music was developed in the form of source files.

[badc0ffee]

There's always another 80s computer I'd never heard of...

The Tatung Einstein was released in 1984 in the UK, was kind of MSX-like architecturally, and used the same 3" (not 3.5") floppies as the Amstrad CPC.

I'm curious what US-based C64 devs would have used. Probably not this machine?

[egypturnash]

From what I’ve read it was not at all uncommon to have a MS-DOS machine that assembled your code much faster and spat it into the c64 over a parallel link.

[flopsamjetsam]

> Plenty of music was developed in the form of source files.

That's fascinating. I came in during the Amiga era, and everything was SoundTracker etc. files. I had no idea that music was hand-coded like this.

[crq-yml]

Some of the sound drivers would be paired with a machine code monitor, and therefore you could interactively develop by modifying hex bytes, which when you think about it, is basically the prototype for a tracker workflow.

There was definitely a tendency to do "compose on the piano, then arrange" with a lot of the early chiptune workflows though. With Galway's stuff there is more reliance on proceduralism to get those long evolving sequences, something which is actually easier to access when it's built from source files and you can define rhythms, chords, dynamics, modulation as forms of indirection.

[talideon]

Sound trackers actually originated on the C64! Chris Huelsbeck's Soundmonitor is generally regarded as the first tracker. There were plenty of others, such as Electrosound, Future Composer, Ubik's Music, and the Ariston Music Editor. It's not that nobody used software for this kind of thing, but it was pretty common to just use your own sound routine and toggle stuff in.