from the what-can-he-do-with-a-Teletype? dept.
Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984
Feel the beep: This album is played entirely on a PC motherboard speaker
If you’re craving a truly different sound with which to slay the crew this weekend, look no further than System Beeps, a new album by shiru8bit — though you may have to drag your old 486 out of storage to play it. Yes, this album runs in MS-DOS and its music is produced entirely through the PC speaker — you know, the one that can only beep.
[...] Shiru, a programmer and musician who’s been doing “retro” sound since before it was retro, took it upon himself to make some music for this extremely limited audio platform. Originally he was just planning on making a couple of tunes for a game project, but in this interesting breakdown of how he made the music, he explains that it ended up ballooning as he got into the tech.
[...] How was he able to do this with such limited tools? [...] I direct you to his lengthy write-up, where he describes, for instance, how to create the impression of different kinds of drums when the hardware is incapable of the white noise usually used to create them (and if it could, it would be unable to layer it over a tone). It’s a fun read and the music is… well, it’s an acquired taste, but it’s original and weird.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday February 10 2019, @07:23AM (2 children)
Read the links. But the major dick in the mashed potatoes was that, while the NES was cranking out some serious mad soundtracks, it did so out of the box and as a self-contained unit.
The sounds being cranked out in the article reminded me of families who could afford a 386 without a SoundBlaster card at the time. Where I grew up, families with PCs were upper middle class if not outright rich. If you could go back to the days and context where NES and PC went head-to-head, the PC loses hands-down even with SoundBlaster cards. SoundBlaster had the timbre, but you still needed good composers and those fuckers couldn't hold a candle to the Japs composing NES music. The NES had Castlevania, Bionic Commander, Megaman, etc.
Now, the demoscene is fucking awesome now, but if you put this shit head-to-head with the NES back in the day, this shit was primitive.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by vux984 on Sunday February 10 2019, @08:24AM (1 child)
These are both from the vanilla PC speaker (no soundblaster) from the late 80s...I remember the first time i fired up Echelon (1988); and my jaw literally dropped.
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/178830-echelon-1988/videos/153010 [gamespot.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50Yo1N-jsi0 [youtube.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealSound [wikipedia.org]
I have to admit, i was expecting something more eyepopping.
You are right about the PC vs NES back in the day, the music budget in games was pretty limited given most pc users didn't have the means to hear it anyway. By the 90s though that had turned around; and there are some truly great PC MIDI tracks -- star control II comes to mind. But that's not apples to apples -- as we're into the SNES era now; and CDROMs and CD audio became commonplace shortly after that ... the wing commander iii intro i think was the next game into to amaze me.
I used to just launch Echelon over and over just to here that little into tune coming out of a PC speaker. What an amazing amount of progress in just 6 years!! From Echelon in 88 -- a few seconds of real audio from a floppy disk + pc speaker to a soundblaster equipped PC for Star Control II and DOOM in 92 / 93 respectively... to something like Wing Commander III in 94 with FMV from CDROM... what a leap in 6 years.
What was 6 years ago from now? Mass Effect 3... the needles barely moved by comparison.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 10 2019, @01:17PM
Sid Meier's Pirates! published in 1987 sported some pretty awesome beeper tunes on PC. Kinda like JS Bach et al.
Can you at least run this sucker on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeDOS [wikipedia.org] ?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Sunday February 10 2019, @01:56PM (4 children)
Back in the day, goofing around on an aging IBM PC, I figured out how to not only get single beeps out but create the illusion of chords by rapidly switching between the notes in the chord. So if you wanted C,E,G at the same time, you'd work out the frequencies for C, E, and G, and then do each one for, say, .02 seconds, and loop that 30 times.
There are limits: If you play the frequency for too short of a time, then the sound doesn't come out, but if you play each pitch for too long, it starts sounding like 3 separate notes.
It sounds like this guy took the concept and turned it up to 11. I'm all for it.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Pino P on Sunday February 10 2019, @03:40PM
In fact, there have been holy wars in some chiptune composing communities over whether to hold each pitch for 16.4 milliseconds (1 vblank) or 32.8 milliseconds (2 vblanks). See this topic on NESdev BBS [nesdev.com] for example.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Sunday February 10 2019, @06:29PM (2 children)
I have fond memories of downloading something like this at school in the early 90s. It was a program that played the entire William Tell Overture (Lone Ranger theme) through the PC speaker. I think somebody even had a primitive music format that you could load into the program, but for simplicity's sake they had bundled the code and the tune into a single EXE.
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(Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Sunday February 10 2019, @07:06PM (1 child)
Hah! I remember this also. I wonder if it is still out there somewhere...
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(Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Sunday February 10 2019, @07:11PM
Of course it is on youtube [youtube.com]
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(Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Sunday February 10 2019, @05:50PM
Working my way through it. Definite retro feel of what they tried to do music wise back in the day on my CompuAdd PC through the motherboard speaker.
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(Score: 2) by KritonK on Monday February 11 2019, @10:40AM
Back in the days of Windows 3.1 (and, possibly, Windows 95), I remember installing a Windows driver that allowed sounds to be played through the PC speaker. I think it produced much better sounds than those in this album.
A quick search found this [winworldpc.com] driver, which may or may not have been it; I have no way of testing it.