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Chiptunes And Beyond

I was a bit surprised today to learn that the NES console, from Nintendo, was released already in 1983, only a year after both the ColecoVision and the C64 was released. This is an 8-bit machine, just as the two other mentioned.

The NES uses a derivative of the same cpu as the C64 has, but it is integrated into a chip that also handles audio and video. The chip is the Ricoh 2A03 for NTSC regions, and the 2A07 for PAL regions.

This Ricoh chip has five audio channels, providing two pulse wave generators, one triangle wave generator, one noise generator, as well as one pcm channel for sample playback duties. The pulse wave resembles a square wave but is more general in terms of pulse width. While the positive and negative portions of the square wave are always equal in length, the tops and bottoms of the pulse wave may have varying relationships.

Due to the slower screen refresh rate of PAL, the 2A07 chip runs at a lower frequency than the 2A03 chip, resulting in a slower, more low pitched music for games not properly ported between the two versions.

Here is music from the NES game Silver Surfer, released in 1990, composed by brothers Tim and Geoff Follin.

Title screen:

Game music:

High score:

And general playthrough:
 
Yeah, I was impressed by several of the tunes on the show. The C64 sound chip is like a complete, built in synthesizer.

The chip used is the MOS Technology 6581/8580 (SID). Its oscillators are built not using frequency dividers, as for example the ones in the Yamaha chip of the Atari ST are, but of (24-bit) phase accumulators. These are able to produce pulse, triangle and sawtooth waves, and noise, for its three audio channels. 8 bits of data from each accumulator is output to the DA converter.

The chip has configurable ADSR volume envelopes for each channel and also supports ring modulation. Additionally, each voice can be routed through a programmable low pass, band pass or high pass filter that is implemented using analog components external to the chip.

International Karate was ported to several different platforms, but here is music from the C64 version. Again, music by Mr Hubbard.


And a Matt Gray remake:
 
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IK music is a true classic.

Here is another nice remake by Shen Lon:

And here is cool "rock" remake by FastLoaders:
 
Here is some more C64 SID music. This time a dual SID composition from 2024. (This one was also streamed at the SID show mentioned earlier.)

Mutetus - Do Not Eat, Throw Away

 
Time for some more Amiga music. These songs are often called modules, as they where usually stored in a module file format, containing both song patterns and instruments for the song.

The sound chip in the Amiga is the MOS Technology 8364, also known as Paula. This chip supports 4 channels of 8-bit pcm sample playback. It does not support sound synthesis however. To make it produce 'chiptune' sounds you'd have to use, or compute, samples.

Funnily enough, just as you can play samples on the Atari ST sound chip (that does not support pcm playback) by writing pcm data to its volume registers from software, you can use the same technique with the Paula chip and write square waves and the like directly to its outputs from software running on the cpu, generating sound waves on the fly.

Here is a track from 1993 running in Protracker on the Amiga.

Laxity - Checknobankh

 
Ah yes, I spent a lot of time messing around with Pro Tracker and Sound Tracker before it on the Amiga. I was never any good at composing, but I liked "seeing" what other people's modules looked like in a tracker.
 
Amiga had a very active demo scene during late 80s and early 90s. One of the first demos I saw on Amiga was Red Sector's Megademo with music by Bit Arts, Romeo Knight, SCS, etc.

 
On the subject of demo scene, in the 90s, there was a famous demo group called Future Crew. One of their musicians was named Skaven (Peter Hajba), who later composed a bunch of game music, including Bejeweled and Unreal Tournament. In early days, he did a lot of tracks in Scream Tracker, and later in Impulse Tracker. He actually still releases music today - he's got this thing called Monthly Music Compo (MMC) where he releases a new track on the 15th of each month. Below is one of his old Scream Tracker tunes as well as one of more recent MMC releases, now done in FL Studio.

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On the subject of demo scene, in the 90s, there was a famous demo group called Future Crew. One of their musicians was named Skaven (Peter Hajba), who later composed a bunch of game music, including Bejeweled and Unreal Tournament. In early days, he did a lot of tracks in Scream Tracker, and later in Impulse Tracker. He actually still releases music today - he's got this thing called Monthly Music Compo (MMC) where he releases a new track on the 15th of each month. Below is one of his old Scream Tracker tunes as well as one of more recent MMC releases, now done in FL Studio.

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Great stuff!
 
Here is a song from an album called I Created Disco, by Calvin Harris. He made this album completely using the OctaMED tracker on the Amiga so I guess it fits nicely into this thread... :cool:

Calvin Harris - The Girls

 
I hope this halfway fits here:

Motorola DSP53600 emulation project

The group "Usual Suspects" wrote a DSP emulator that can run various old virtual analog synthesizer firmwares like the Access Virus or Waldorf Microwave series. The corresponding VST plugins are even free downloads, check above website. Honestly, I don't even know how they avoid legal trouble. :D

My ears are telling me, their emulation is pinpoint accurate. I've had a Microwave XT and MicroQ myself, and am very familiar with the usual Virus factory demos. All of these sound superb - and naturally there's zero noise and DAC influence, since that's taken out of the equation. It's hardly noticeable for the average ear, but I dare say all these synths sound better than ever before on the emulator. Technical perfection.


Check the Virus A and MicroQ factory demos, the first ones especially. Play at highest comfortable volume. So much character that comes out nicely. These Usual Suspect dudes did a great job with the implementation. Any of these synths are utter legends amongst producers and musicians, and they breathed new life into them and provided conservation for eternity, beyond aging hardware. Big thumbs up!
 
That's great! I found this thread on another forum discussing artists that leveraged Amiga:

Dance Nation was one of them, apparently, but they used a later model Amiga, I think, not the lowly 500 that I had...
Hehe, that's pretty funny. Here's another one, made on a dual Amiga 500 setup.

Urban Shakedown - Some Justice

 
I hope this halfway fits here:

Motorola DSP53600 emulation project

The group "Usual Suspects" wrote a DSP emulator that can run various old virtual analog synthesizer firmwares like the Access Virus or Waldorf Microwave series. The corresponding VST plugins are even free downloads, check above website. Honestly, I don't even know how they avoid legal trouble. :D

My ears are telling me, their emulation is pinpoint accurate. I've had a Microwave XT and MicroQ myself, and am very familiar with the usual Virus factory demos. All of these sound superb - and naturally there's zero noise and DAC influence, since that's taken out of the equation. It's hardly noticeable for the average ear, but I dare say all these synths sound better than ever before on the emulator. Technical perfection.


Check the Virus A and MicroQ factory demos, the first ones especially. Play at highest comfortable volume. So much character that comes out nicely. These Usual Suspect dudes did a great job with the implementation. Any of these synths are utter legends amongst producers and musicians, and they breathed new life into them and provided conservation for eternity, beyond aging hardware. Big thumbs up!
Nice!

Some early computers had these sorts of DSPs built in also. For example, the Atari Falcon030, from 1992, had a Motorola 56001 chip, but I don't know if these chips where utilized much in music in these computers at the time.
 
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Hehe, that's pretty funny. Here's another one, made on a dual Amiga 500 setup.

Urban Shakedown - Some Justice

Holy shit, that's serious oldschool beats and serious bass.

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