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Jul - Computers and Technology - PC Speaker Music New poll - New thread - New reply
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paulguy

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Posted on 01-11-12 10:41:29 PM Link | Quote
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I'm making this thread to discuss music that is played back through the PC speaker. Either games that had good PC speaker music or individual pieces that are outside of games or maybe technical discussions, or whatever.

I don't have any specific examples, but a lot of ZZT games have good PC speaker music.
I recently took the sheet music for the ducktales theme and wrote it for PC speaker. It was pretty lame and not really finished and had some problems that I'm too lazy to fix, but I guess on the plus side I found some bugs that I fixed in my player.

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Nicole

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Posted on 01-11-12 10:43:03 PM Link | Quote
I remember at one point there was a "ZZM" music format and player for music from ZZT games, but I haven't been able to find anything of it for like a decade or so now... it'd be neat if it still existed somewhere.

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ReiNi
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Posted on 01-11-12 11:02:02 PM (last edited by Shy Mikan at 01-11-12 08:03 PM) Link | Quote
Um...
this is the most heavenly sound to ever come out of a PC Speaker

My only real experiences with internal speaker music would be this program from Something Unreal which was quite fun to mess around with. But I don't think that counts unless you can get the files it uses to whatever format games and such used.

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divingkataetheweirdo

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Posted on 01-31-12 01:35:46 AM Link | Quote
<object width="560" height="315"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/7OmO-9c_kP4?version=3&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="560" height="315" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object>

Holy cow. This is the most beautiful PC Speaker music I've heard so far, even though there are 12 PCs in the video. It is still quite nice to listen to.

I would be interesting to see what options are available for PC speaker music composition, but I've never held a long-term interest. Shame, because there is some unique stuff you can do with a speaker, if you have the patience.
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Posted on 02-04-12 03:13:04 AM (last edited by Bitmap at 02-04-12 12:14 AM) Link | Quote
E- GAH! Misread thread title AND thread. Very bad on my part. Ignore this.

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Posted on 02-04-12 08:15:17 PM Link | Quote
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Metal_Man88's Post
Originally posted by divingkataetheweirdo
<object width="560" height="315"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/7OmO-9c_kP4?version=3&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="560" height="315" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object>

Holy cow. This is the most beautiful PC Speaker music I've heard so far, even though there are 12 PCs in the video. It is still quite nice to listen to.

I would be interesting to see what options are available for PC speaker music composition, but I've never held a long-term interest. Shame, because there is some unique stuff you can do with a speaker, if you have the patience.


Well, it gets around the limitations of a PC speaker by having many of them, such that it becomes a bit more like an 8-bit orchestra.

At that point it's probably more efficient to just compose using 8-bit sine or square waves, to get the same effect without 12 computers. :p

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paulguy

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Posted on 02-05-12 03:38:53 AM Link | Quote
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I believe it was Creative Music System (pre Adlib stuff) which had a bunch of square channels. Kind of interesting.

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Bisqwit
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Posted on 07-13-12 10:17:21 AM (last edited by Bisqwit at 07-13-12 02:41:47 PM) Link | Quote
Do you refer to using the PC speaker in its squarewave tone format (as used by most of the 286 games), or using it to drive PWM music (PCM-like, but with a high-pitched background noise), such as many 386 demos and MOD players?
Because when you allow PWM, you can pretty much get anything.

Also, do you count SN76496, the chip in Tandy 1000 (a PC with 8088 that I have) that gave the computer capability for three-channel sound and changing volume but otherwise sounds exactly like the PC speaker?
About year ago I created this video, in which I write in assembler and demonstate a program that plays NES music on the Tandy 1000, and at parts it sounds pretty authentic: http://youtu.be/gjuHxjdv3ZE (music begins at 8:26).
It is a successor to this other video, in which I demonstrate the soundchip in GW-BASIC: http://youtu.be/e3L_Ceat4Ss

Incidentally, I also demonstrated how the chip can crudely approximate PCM sound even without PWM tricks, by simply reprograming all the signal generators very rapidly (but not so rapidly as to emulate PCM/PWM) in a precisely calculated manner. The sound in this video is produced through an emulated SN76496: http://youtu.be/YBxq7k45pBo - Surprisingly, the speech is understandable for most parts, as long as there is not much background noise.

Unfortunately I don't particularly know any good cases for PWM-less PC speaker music (not that it doesn't exist). FM/OPL is more my thing :-)
paulguy

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Posted on 07-13-12 02:03:28 PM Link | Quote
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I didn't bother with pwm based playback. Linux already has an ALSA driver for that.

As for good music without pwm, there are some zzt games that had some neat title screen music, as well as some demo worlds that showed various compositions. Some pretty neat stuff.

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Posted on 03-05-13 08:57:26 AM Link | Quote
There's a sweet spot around 1987-1989 where PC speaker music had some real effort put into it from the retail devs(and a longer period, a few years into the 90s, for shareware - where they actually had music!). For example Zak McKracken, or Ski or Die. However, as OPL2-based cards, MT-32, and the Amiga all gained adoption, most of the composers started making their target arrangement for one of those three and then squeezed the result into one voice. I have a hard time recommending most of the stuff after 1990 because of that - most of it consisted of "careless" arpeggiation, unless an actual chiptune guy worked on it, e.g. Martin Walker's First Samurai.

I would also be remiss not to mention that I coded up voice-stealing MIDI (SMF) playback for a Flash-based PC speaker emulation. Only used it in this game. (PCM is fake, of course) I grew that implementation into a "real synth" until it collapsed under its own complexity, and I'm aiming to bring it back eventually with improved engineering techniques now that I know my way around audio code better.

Aside - I highly recommend following this path of a minimal SMF implementation if you want to motivate more learning about synthesis - after you first get it running, you have a huge library of music available to test your implementation against, as well as lots of features suggested by the MIDI standards and often used in SMF files. It gets you in this feedback loop of adding "just one more thing" that makes all the music sound a little bit better.
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Jul - Computers and Technology - PC Speaker Music New poll - New thread - New reply


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