UK's National Museum of Computing asks tunesmiths to recreate bleeps, bloops, and parps of retro game music The UK's National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) is running a competition aimed at recreating the bleeps, whistles, and flatulent squawks of video game music from years gone by. It's all in honour of the 40th anniversary of the BBC Micro, which, if memory serves, was not really a ball of fire in the sound department when put up …
BBC Basic was rather more sophisticated with higher level support... and that was a thin wrapper around "OS" level operations, so usable without the Basic interpreter.
Hence various games later on having speech synthesis.
And
> 40th anniversary of the BBC Micro
I deny the reality in which it is that long ago!
I had programmed an EPROM to have the Beeb greet me with my name when booting up. Instead, it screamed in agony and I had to put it down. Sigh. (it wasn't as if I was going to code, burn, test, erase, code, burn, test for a couple of months)
But it was a blast, in every sense of the word.
There were several add-ons for the Beeb to do so, and even with just one ROM socket you still had empty, an 8k or 16k SRAM and a wire to connect the SRAM's R/W to some equivalent signal elsewhere you could achieve the same.
I did that rather a lot... even added custom command to CBM basic through that approach.
Later I just did everything in assembly but I was young and I was learning things step by step until the only basic I used was to load the assembler.
Still a lot better than the Speccie. Make a beep for 1 seconds and everything stopped for that 1 second. Hence the number of games with farty noises as you could make a very short sound frequently to allow the main program continue running.
Anyone still do imitations of 'Meteor Storm' speech?
I'm sure I can remember a game on the ZX81 that had sound. Strictly, the ZX81 didn't have any sound, turning up the volume on the TV just gave you white noise.
The ZX81 had a "fast" mode which simply turned off the video update. Switching between the modes created a blip in the white noise. I think it was a 3D maze game that rapidly switched modes in machine code, giving differently pitched fart noises from the TV.
Happy memories of tweaking BBC games to make them more convenient to load or to give infinite lives. There was a ROM called EXMON? Something like that and I disassembled everything!
OK now I am getting over enthusiastic - I have found the manual for EXMON, how can this still exist!
http://stardot.org.uk/mirrors/www.bbcdocs.com/filebase/software/apps/EXMONIImanual.pdf
I think it was Frak that had some more complicated mechanism with self modifying code - but 'patching' the game was at least as much fun as playing it.
I remember a bit of 6502 that I did to allow me to play games with to the limit RAM requirements despite the space lost for the disk drivers (that was floppy disk!). It intercepted the system calls and copied the relevant bit of game RAM to video until the floppy call was completed. Level 9 adventures - anyone remember them? The only one I completed was snowball but the resistor colour codes set me up for my future career. I was totally blown away when it played Vivaldi during the long long tape load times.
Upvote for Level 9 adventures. Great games, second only to (on the Amiga) Magnetic Scrolls.
With every item you carried you could get a longer description. One was 'The hospital gown fits you like a second skin - possibly a hippos'.
(I also liked Acornsoft's Sphinx Adventure, Acheton and Philosopher's Quest - but never finished them).
which can generate BBC BASIC code from any MIDI file you'd care to create, fitting up to 3 notes per channel via envelope arpeggiation, although I didn't code any support for the noise channel (but happy to accept patches).
Alternatively RISC OS has 8-channel polyphony (and runs natively on the Pi), but viewpoints may vary as to whether that can be counted as "retro".
Aaahh! But the BBC Micro had the awesome Music 5000 add-on, which turned it into a full-on synthesizer! I recall many happy hours spent programming "Telstar", "Nutrocker" and several other classics into it, using the supplied "Ample" programming language.
However, my crowning glory was managing to get the whole of Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D minor" into it, which required some deft programming shortcuts to get it all into the 32KB of RAM! Took me weeks to figure out how to do it!
Happy Days!
--
Pete
I had Toccata, Golden Brown, and Sweet Dreams as BASIC programs using the internal sound system on the Beeb. I'm sure I had others too that I can't remember now - possibly there was Only You as well - I'll have to dig the 5.25" floppies out of storage - not that I've got a drive to read them any more... or a Beeb... Superior Software games had good soundtracks (Repton, anyone?).
P.S. It wasn't the Golden Brown causing the Sweet Dreams, either.
Ah, you beat me to it, mentioning Golden Brown. I had it too - probably the same version - for the BBC Bs in the school lab (Room 1, on the right just before the cafeteria, presided over by Mr Higgins). Blew my mind at the time that a computer could do such “realistic” music.
Then a little later, if memory serves, I got the game Zanthrax on my Speccy, complete with synthesised speech, and my ghast was even more flabbered.
"Then a little later, if memory serves, I got the game Zanthrax on my Speccy, complete with synthesised speech, and my ghast was even more flabbered."
My first experience of speech on 8-bit was Robot Attack on TRS-80.
Skip to 58 seconds if you get board watching the "Star Wars" scrolling intro. And bare in mind this is simply pulsing the the single bit cassette output port. It was mind blowing at the time. With add-ons like the Orchestra-80, it was capable of some respectable sounds and music too.
> I had Toccata, Golden Brown, and Sweet Dreams as BASIC programs using the internal sound system on the Beeb.
In the 90s I found a friend with an Amiga had access to a Beeb with some of these and we had a go at getting the files readable by an emulator. When our naive efforts failed, I studied the BASIC programs and hand-created versions in OctaMED for him to enjoy.
Move forward to this weekend, and all this came up in a pub conversation. This week I've found some of these as YouTube videos, and been throwing some disk images at jsbeeb. For the former, I was impressed by results the search term "beeb tracker" produces.
In particular I also recall a Liberty Bell/Monty Python theme, an Axel F version that called itself the "B B & C Mix" (IIRC; other versions drop more readily out of google) and a Blue Monday version where you could mix and match what was playing in each channel. Sadly, I've not tracked those down.
Earworms galore!
Manic Miner / Jet Set Willy (In the Hall of the Mountain King)
Frak
Repton
Arcadians (little piece of music as you started the game, but not any during IIRC)
Citadel (speech welcoming you to the game and another one with a little tune as it started)
Pole Position (a wee bit of psych-up music as you prepared to qualify/race)
possibly a bit late to publicise this - 8 bit symphony
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-45677787
A friend of a friend told me that the musicians enjoyed the performance at least as much as the sell-out audience.
For me, background music to Spindizzy (on the Commode) ftw
Allister Brimble's music was basically the soundtrack to my youth. I had several of his Amiga demo floppy disks (and indeed, still fire them up under WinUAE occasionally). His versions of the Art of Noise Peter Gunn theme, and Crockett's Theme, were awesome.
Big thumbs up to Allister, wherever he is now.
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