One of the small fixes I made today was allowing the notes to start scrolling before the song starts – e.g. if the first note appears on the board when the song starts, if this is immediately once the playboard appears, it wouldn’t give the player time to press it. In this way, there is a 2 second lead in when it shows the first note scrolling down the board, and when it hits the bottom is when the song starts (assuming the first note was recorded when the song starts). You wouldn’t think this would be such a hard thing to implement, but because of a lot of little things it was way too much time. The devil is always in the details. Anyway, its working now.

Also, I think I figured out a way to implement a usable note editor on the C64. Using the following features, I think it will work even with the limitations of SID files:
1. When editing a song, it loads whatever note data it has for a song. If no note file is found, it just starts with blank. Notes are shown on the board just like in regular play mode.
2. Song plays at 1/4th speed to allow recording notes a bit easier. However, the more the whammy bar is pressed, the faster the song plays, up to double speed (e.g. fast forward).
3. If the player strums down while pressing buttons, those buttons are recorded at that position in the song.
4. If the player strums up while pressing buttons, those buttons are deleted at that position in the song (if they’re there. If they’re not nothing happens).
5. If the player strums down while pressing no buttons, the song is saved.
6. If the player strums up while pressing no buttons, the song restarts (since its pretty much impossible to “rewind” a sid, restarting and then using the fast forward function is a good alternative, especially considering SIDs aren’t that long generally.
7. If all 5 buttons are pressed and player strums up, the entire song is blanked out and restarted.

I think this will allow the player to keep restarting and recording things just the way he/she likes them and then continue on to the next section and do the same, and finally save. I think this will work and I won’t have to make a windows editor, which I really didn’t want to do (because of wanting this to be done and wanting to keep everything on the C64 platform). Anyway, work on the note editor will start this week! It will probably take me a couple days. Then I’ll be picking out sids and recording notes (now that I have a nice note editor), which will take a couple days. I have a vacation coming up on the 25th, so by the end of that week, everything should be done (except firmware updates on the PSX64) and a video should be up! We’re almost there!