Chiptunes And Beyond

[Ibofobi]

This thread is for sharing your favourite chiptunes and everything related, including early computer and game console music, new interpretations and remixes, as well as new retro style music.

I'll start with an Atari ST chiptune from the game Jug, released in 1988, composed by Paul Shields:

 

[Ropeburn]

Hooray!

How about we kick it off with THE LEGEND?

Karsten Koch - Aryx

Made famous by Tom's Hardware's Pentium 4 5GHz project:

 

[Berwhale]

I had it on my Atari 1040 STE, but the Amiga version will have to do...

 

[escape2]

Donkey Kong Country - Aquatic Ambiance, cover by Volkor X:

Original by David Wise:

 

[JeffS7444]

Monkey Island 3: The Curse of Monkey Island

 

[RandomEar]

One Must Fall 2097 Theme

Turbo Outrun Theme

 

[Timcognito]

Pennies on the Dollar and it goes to a number of good charities. Not a scam I've gotten a number of good CAD/CAM programs and books worth thousands. Primarily a gamer and programmer site a mile wide and deep.

All Bundles

Our Bundles are limited-time collections of games, books, software, and more. Pay what you want and choose where your money goes, including to charity.

www.humblebundle.com

 

[Count Arthur]

How about tracks inspired by games?:

Stakker Humanoid - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[punosion]

 

[Ibofobi]

How about tracks inspired by games?:

Stakker Humanoid - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Sounds good to me!

 

[Ibofobi]

Wow, didn't see this coming!

 

[escape2]

Cannon Fodder remix by Gibs:

Also a nice piano rendition of this track:

 

[Ropeburn]

Rammstein - Deutschland C64 cover:

 

[kemmler3D]

One Must Fall 2097 Theme

Turbo Outrun Theme

Oh man, OMF 2097. This was a game I played a lot of, back when. Theme slaps.

I think what makes chiptunes good is good musicians maximizing what they can do with very limited tools. So a lot of the old stuff from the 90s and earlier is legitimately good music, but more fascinating because you can hear them coaxing the gear to do stuff it wasn't necessarily intended to do.

I think what makes modern "chiptunes" bad is it's mostly mediocre musicians emulating limited equipment with modern equipment so they can take advantage of nostalgia to get some listeners for music that's formalist but not actually good. There are exceptions - YMCK are good and happen to work in chiptunes:

 

[escape2]

Just realizing this gal has done a lot of Amiga covers on piano... here is another: Agony Main Theme. I remember playing this on Amiga 500...

 

[escape2]

Before Amiga, I had an Atari 800XL. One of the games I was really impressed with on Atari was Draconus, both from a graphics as well as music perspective.

Here is the original:

Nice cover by Tim Forsyth can be downloaded here: https://remix.kwed.org/download.php/7037/Tim Forsyth - Draconus.mp3

 

[Ibofobi]

Here is music from the classic games Xenon and Xenon 2 Megablast, available on a multitude of platforms.

First, a chiptune from Xenon, from 1988, on Atari ST, composed by David Whittaker:

And then, music from a patched Atari STE version of Xenon 2 Megablast, from 1989, streaming 25 KHz sampled music directly from the harddrive. This would not have been feasible with the limited size of the 720 KB floppy disks in use at the time. This music is by Bomb The Bass / David Whittaker:

Did you notice by the way that many old chiptunes run in specific tempos like 125 bpm, 107 bpm, or 93 bpm? The Atari ST for example can operate in PAL (at 50 Hz) or NTSC (at 60 Hz) TV mode. The way a chiptune commonly was replayed was to hook up its replay routine to the screen refresh, calling a function in the replay routine every time you also updated the graphics on the screen. At 50 Hz refresh rate this happens at 20 ms intervals. Using 6 screen refeshes (120 ms) for each 1/16 note in the tracker results in 125 bpm. Using 7 screen refeshes (140 ms) for each 1/16 note results in 107 bpm. Etc...

I don't know what use you'll have of this knowledge, but perhaps you can drop this bomb of exciting information at some boring party to get it started?... ;-)

 

[Ibofobi]

Repost (from the electronica thread) of an Atari ST chiptune from 2017:

!Cube - Elusive Groove

The Atari ST sound chip, the Yamaha YM2149F, has three square wave oscillators, driving an audio channel each. From the oscilloscope view above it is apparent that more things are going on, like pulse width modulation in this case. Such extravaganza are not supported natively by this sound chip but has to be programmed using fast paced volume level and waveform updates of the sound chip from the software running on the cpu of the machine.

Also, with only three audio channels available, you'll have to be careful, coordinating the different sounds, interleaving them, to make the most out of the sound chip.

 

[Ibofobi]

Oh man, OMF 2097. This was a game I played a lot of, back when. Theme slaps.

I think what makes chiptunes good is good musicians maximizing what they can do with very limited tools. So a lot of the old stuff from the 90s and earlier is legitimately good music, but more fascinating because you can hear them coaxing the gear to do stuff it wasn't necessarily intended to do.

I think what makes modern "chiptunes" bad is it's mostly mediocre musicians emulating limited equipment with modern equipment so they can take advantage of nostalgia to get some listeners for music that's formalist but not actually good. There are exceptions - YMCK are good and happen to work in chiptunes:

I agree, constraints are probably a very good source for creativity.

 

[Ibofobi]

Before Amiga, I had an Atari 800XL. One of the games I was really impressed with on Atari was Draconus, both from a graphics as well as music perspective.

Here is the original:

Nice cover by Tim Forsyth can be downloaded here: https://remix.kwed.org/download.php/7037/Tim Forsyth - Draconus.mp3

Seems to be a really nice game, and I like the music. I don't recognize the game and from what I can tell it didn't reach the Atari ST, which I had. Great cover version as well!