I snuck some hours in yesterday before I went to the dentist and worked on things. Shredz64 can now take a (static) list of button data (e.g. buttons to be pressed at what time and in what order) and correctly show it on the screen. For instance, I can encode data that says “A green button should be pressed at 00:00:10, 00:00:20, and 00:00:45, a red button should be pressed at 00:00:10, 00:00:30, etc, and it will correctly show and scroll the sprites on screen. It will also detect if you strum the correct chords at the correct times and increase your score upon success. I’ve also added a “Shredocity” meter that mirrors the functionality of Star Power in Guitar Hero for the Playstation. I will soon be adding a crowd meter that will determine how well you’re playing. Here is a screenshot that shows some button data on the screen. The Shredocity meter is a bit chunky looking right now, I’ll be thinning out the graphics.

Overall, things are going really well. The framework of all the controls and graphics are pretty much done, there is only the big project left of incorporating SIDs in as the source of the music, and the smaller task of reading the song data from files on disk. SID music is ironically incredibly hard to work with on a C64 since its just machine code that was ripped from some other program, but I have plans incorporating SID plugins for XMMS to convert it over to a different usable format. More on that later after some code has been written.