Our family tuned into this show on the BBC every week, so it was good to hear that the archives are being made available once again online through the BBC website for fans to watch again.

“Red Dwarf is a British science fiction comedy franchise created by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, which primarily consists of a television sitcom that aired on BBC Two between 1988 and 1999”.

Wikipedia 30/06/2023 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dwarf

Science fiction and comedy is often not considered a good mix, broadly speaking, being a fan of the Sci-Fi genre, I would tend to agree. To get to the escape velocity needed to be a good piece of escapism it must be believable. Unfortunately, comedy can undermine realism. Red Dwarf along with the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the galaxy are among one good examples of where the balance is about right.

I had an Amiga A3000 computer and loved open-source software. Before the age of the internet the main access to programs was either through buying Public Domain software from local computers shops or buying computer magazines that gave away free floppy disks.

Music trackers were very popular at the time with OctaMED being one of the best for the Amiga computer. The graphics hardware in the Amiga was considered pretty good for its price when the machines were first shipped. The Amiga had 4 tone generators built into its system. The OctaMED program managed to split the audio resources to make 8 synthesiser channels that could be controlled via a MIDI interface.

An analogue to digital converter could be added to one of the ports and controlled with sampling software. It was possible to create 8-bit sample sounds which is not impressive, but good enough if you wanted to make your own samples. Better quality samples could were readily available from the Public Domain from local computer shops on 2.5-inch floppy disks.

The Red Dwarf TV series being So popular at the time, I found some sound samples of bits of the dialogue from the show which I used to make a rock music piece with the OctaMED program. The piece uses other public domain samples for drums, guitars, and bass for the backline of the band which I called the Mekheads (Fans will understand the reference here).

I managed to double track Lister’s vocal line by assigning different pitches to create a pseudo-flanging effect, which I am still pleased with the solution used to overcome the limitations of the tracking software.

Sadly, the old Amiga A3000 is no longer functioning and has gone to the recyclers. The version heard on my Soundcloud page is all that is left of the WAV file captured from plugging the Amiga my replacement Windows 98 PC.