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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: 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] ?