Martin Galway open-sources his 1980s Commodore 64 game music source

Legendary SID composer Martin Galway has published the original source files for his Commodore 64 game music on GitHub, covering work from the mid-1980s including Wizball, Athena, Times of Lore, and Insects in Space. The repository exposes both the music data and the assembly-level player routines, letting readers study how Galway squeezed performance out of the SID chip.

Galway notes the release spans two generations of his player code: a first-generation engine used from 1984 through mid-1987 (Wizball), and a second-generation player debuted on Athena and reused in later titles. He acquired the rights from Infogrames and now permits reassembly, modification, and derivative compositions provided he is credited as the original author.

For retro computing and chiptune communities, this is a primary-source artifact rather than a reverse-engineered approximation — useful for anyone reconstructing the techniques behind one of the platform’s most distinctive sound libraries.