2025/12/3: Commodore 64: Jingle Disk

[VideoGameCritic]

Well this should help you get into the holiday spirit. The C64 Critic aka Sudz actually sent this to me last year but it was too late for Christmas, so I held it until this year, and almost forgot!

Let me know what you think.

[VideoGameCritic]

Here is his original review before I took my editor chainsaw to it. Pretty wordy but a lot of personality.


Ahhh, my first N/A review! I never thought I’d pen one of these, but while rummaging through my
massive stack ‘o random disks over the summer I stumbled upon not one but TWO disks labeled ‘Jingle
Disk’, one from 1985 and one from 1986. What better time to give them a gander than the holidays?
With Mrs. C64 Critic and myself hosting ~20 relatives for Thanksgiving and then again for Christmas Eve,
I figured that was the best time to actually load one of these puppies up. I selected the 1986 version,
only because I liked the cool mistletoe-green color of the floppy disk.
Upon loading you’re given an option to select either ‘1’ or ‘2’, with ‘1’ being a pre-programmed
animation with a bit of a rhyming Christmas story to go along with animated sequences of a mouse and
a toy soldier poking some poor sleeping cat in the nose for no good reason other than to be jerks, and
then escaping quickly (at least the mouse does) before the cat can tear them to shreds. Option ‘2’ gives
you a personalized Christmas card-making programming, whereby you can make a customized
Christmas card to your friends, family, or enemies (should one desire), assuming you still you have an
80-column Commodore MPS-801 handy and hooked up. And that its printer ribbon hasn’t completely
dried out over the preceding three decades.
For my purposes, I of course selected ‘1’ so that I and my extended family could ‘enjoy’ the whimsical
Christmas SID chip music and 8-bit renderings of a feline being unfairly maligned by a jerkweed mouse
and a magically animated soldier. I was hoping that by loading this program, it would continue to loop
over and over in the background so that family could poke their heads in and enjoy it at their leisure
throughout the course of their visit, but alas it would only ever loop once and then I’d have to manually
select ‘1’ again in order to get it restart.
There is no game here; this is strictly a slightly animated slide show/poem, with some warm and
welcoming Christmas music to go along with it. Apparently these disks were distributed originally as
freebie holiday gifts from Hewson Consultants to their customers, but proved to be so popular upon
reception that they continued making them for a few years and added selling them commercially for a
nice profit. Who ever said that Christmas spirit wasn’t just Capitalism dressed up in a red outfit and
tended to by elves? Commies, at best.
It’s too bad there isn’t some kind of ‘loop’ feature included with the program, because I can see me
loading this up and letting it run in the background every year around Christmas just to enjoy the music
and take me back to a time and place where this kind of computational power truly left me in awe. As it
is, it still gets me in the Holiday mood, but only as long as it takes for me to boot up Jumpman or some
other C64 game that reminds me of Decembers of yore.

[VideoGameCritic]

After I told Sudz to just put something heavy on the "1" key he replied with this:


Although I have nothing I can easily stand on that key and fully press in just that key, I tried this out by keeping it depressed with my finger and it did not work; it cause the program to get 'hung up' on the 3rd scene (and not play the music that normally would have been playing). So a good idea, but doesn't work.

As far as music and whatnot, I replayed the whole stupid thing so I could write down what exactly happens...
After loading the program, the initial screen plays a Christmas tune... something from the Nutcracker I'm sure, but I don't know the name of the actual song.
You select "1" to play the Christmas animation (vice 2, which will allow you to create either a seasons greetings card or a seasons greeting DISK! I didn't even catch that the first time around, such a cool idea).
After hitting "1" you get a rhyming wall of text, explaining the Christmas scene.
After the text, the animation starts - a far away view of some homes, which then 'zooms in' to a single home, and then 'zooms in' again to the front door. "Santa Claus is comin' to Town" plays while the animation runs. Since it's the C64, of course all the music is top notch for the time.
After the animation, more text is displayed to further the story. The next animation starts, with "Oh Christmas Tree" music playing.
Another screen of text, followed by another animation. This one shows the mouse and toy soldier marching off to ef with the cat. Music is playing, but it's not Christmas music... not sure what it is actually, I don't recognize it.
Another screen of text, followed by an animation of the mouse running from the cat. Another Nutcracker song is playing, but again I don't know the name of it.
Another screen of text, and an animation of the mouse dropping down into a train (driven by another mouse), while Jingle Bells plays.
Final screen of text(s) (two of them back to back actually) and then a final graphic of Santa and his reindeer flying off in the distance with a Seasons Greetings message below it, while "We Wish you a Merry Christmas" plays.

You can watch the whole thing yourself here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEi9Us7q96o&t=78s

[Stalvern]

Entertaining review of a cute little curiosity that I don't think I'd ever have known about otherwise.

But that disk is clearly holly green, not the much lighter and yellower mistletoe. (And MIDI has nothing to do with the C64's audio.)

[JohanOberg]

Cool, I remember hearing about this in the Video Game Historian's video about the Mega Man PC games, published by stinkfactory Hi-Tech Expressions, who started with these interactive christmas card-type things.
I own one similar thing, Santa Claus no Takarabako (Santa Claus' Treasure Chest) for Famicom Disk System. It's similar and on a disk too. You can write a message and edit the santa claus sprite animation, so if you have the time you could make Mario run on there.

[matmico399]

Sounds cute and I think I would run it on Christmas Day with guests over. Unfortunately I don't have a C64 anymore. As far as looping it I'm curious how long it plays before you have to restart it. But I did find this, a download for your modern PC.

https://www.atarimania.com/utility-atar ... 20525.html

[VideoGameCritic]

Being an Atari guy, I always associated computer-generated music with the term "midi", but I guess I'll drop it if it doesn't apply here.

[newmodelarmy]

This might be the best "N/A" review of all time! Very cool and nostalgic. Man do I miss the C-64! This "review" reminded me of many cold nights in upstate NY, playing my C-64 while it's snowing and freezing cold outside! Good to see the C-64 critic finally back to work!

[Stalvern]

Being an Atari guy, I always associated computer-generated music with the term "midi", but I guess I'll drop it if it doesn't apply here.

MIDI support was a big selling point for the ST because none of the other computers of the time had it. It's a standard that allows musical instruments to be controlled electronically; you could plug a synthesizer into your ST and let the computer play your composition directly. A lot of electronic artists and groups used the ST to control their instruments in the '80s and even the '90s, when far superior systems were available but the ST still had cachet as a tool of the trade.

As for music on a computer itself, after the format was upgraded to include a standardized library of sound samples, it was used in a lot of '90s PC games, most notably Doom. It's the same signals that would be sent to a keyboard, but they're being used to play a defined "snare drum" or "electric guitar" sample. It was also used outside of games, especially on early websites whose owners wanted them to play music but couldn't stream full recordings over dial-up. (One of my earliest Internet memories is of a GeoCities page that played a slightly dissonant version of "Closing Time".) Since the samples were all on the visitor's computer, the music on the site took up no more space than a text file.

This is far from the only sample-based music format. While the ST could control a keyboard and the Amiga couldn't, the Amiga could play its own samples in music files called modules, while the ST was stuck with a dinky little sound chip straight out of the Master System and many other 8-bit machines. The SNES was another system that relied on sampled instead of synthesized audio. Most interestingly, the Apple IIGS did not have MIDI support but did have a real synthesizer inside it – designed by the same man as the SID chip! After leaving Commodore, Bob Yannes started a successful synthesizer company called Ensoniq, and Apple somehow decided that the sound chip from Ensoniq's synthesizers belonged inside the Apple II's 16-bit upgrade. A year later, the synthesizer company Roland offered a similarly powerful sound device for PCs called the MT-32, which became legendary in DOS gaming.

In any case, people do sometimes use "MIDI" as a generic term for sampled audio because of how prevalent its use is for such, but this is a matter of ignorance, like a grandma calling a PS2 a "Nintendo". Even though the SID is not sample-based and doesn't justify even this extremely liberal sense of the term, I was still prepared to let the error go. But in a review that mentions the model name of a Commodore printer? Not a chance!

[ActRaiser]

In any case, people do sometimes use "MIDI" as a generic term for sampled audio because of how prevalent its use is for such, but this is a matter of ignorance, like a grandma calling a PS2 a "Nintendo". Even though the SID is not sample-based and doesn't justify even this extremely liberal sense of the term...

This whole post was more informative than everything else I've read this week. Thank you for taking the time to write it up. I love reading about old video game/computer history. Thank you, sir!