In this video, The 8-Bit Guy takes a look at how old-school 8-bit music worked, with an emphasis on video games systems.
Did you have any of these systems? Leave a comment and let us know!
via Sonic State
In this video, The 8-Bit Guy takes a look at how old-school 8-bit music worked, with an emphasis on video games systems.
Did you have any of these systems? Leave a comment and let us know!
via Sonic State
I used to play with various tracking programs while in highschool. i thought they were rad, but didn’t really understand what i was doing. I remember loading in a lot of images into the samples to get weird trashy glitches.
Are there any midi-Playable Synths out there that use the 9 Voice Yamaha YM3812 Chip? DIY would be okay if it’s a kit with all Parts in it…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLJSdNYcdpk
imo opl3 is more interesting.
get in on midiboxFM /sammichFM preorder so they can start shipping! 🙂 http://www.midibox.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=sammichfm
http://midibox.org/forums/topic/17001-any-more-sammichfms-yes-see-page-2/?page=1
i run an old laptop with real opl3 and ad-lib tracker II http://www.adlibtracker.net (supposedly can do midi but i’ve not figured it out) once you get your head around it you can do some pretty interesting things with it’s FM and sequencer implementation that it’s a shame yamaha (or anyone else really) never developed further, cool additive, macros, ‘preset’ sounds and so on. it’s noisy coming out of laptop, but sounds nice sampled and so on. even worthwhile running emulated/dosbox imo. 🙂
he’s technically accurate about the NES voice structure, but doesnt seem to know it can also be programmed in unique ways that gives it funky options, similar to tricks on the c64 (but not the same technique)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjxIXmsqNpU
Here you go mate:
Synths that use the YM3812:
Yamaha PSR-11 49-keys 16-sounds (1986)
Yamaha PSR-12 49-keys 32-sounds (1987)
Yamaha PSR-31 61-keys 16-sounds, additional chip for drums (1991)
Yamaha PSR-32 61-keys 32-sounds, additional chip for drums (1987)
Yamaha PSS-460 49-keys 21-sounds (1986)
Yamaha PSS-470 49-keys 21-sounds (1987)
Yamaha PSS-560 49-keys 21-sounds, additional chip for drums (1986)
Yamaha PSS-570 49-keys 21-sounds, additional chip for drums (1987)
really interesting. back to the roots.
There are all sorts of fun carts you can get to turn old video game systems into synthesizers!
Currently in my collection I have:
Pulsar for the NES
Synthcart for Atari 2600
Cynthcart, Prophet64, and Retroskoii+ for the Commodore 64
&
LSDJ for Nintendo Gameboy, (plus several other ROM carts, shitwave, musictech, etc.)
fyi there’s a huge community out there for musicians into this stuff and it’s called “chiptune “and you should check it out if you’ve never heard of it!
I don’t have any personal experience with the C64, but I thought what made it appealing to people was that it could do ring modulation between the VCOs and the arpeggiator went into audio rate.
I don’t believe the SID chip had an arpeggiator. How fast you could change the registers of the SID depended on the speed of your 6502 code. If you turned off interrupts and sat in a tight loop, you could change things pretty fast, but that’s not how game songs worked–they were probably mostly using the vertical blank interrupt to change things (that’s 50Hz or 60Hz, I guess, depending on whether your display was PAL or NTSC). At least that’s how I did it when I did game music on the 64.
The SID had lots of cool features. It had 3 onboard ADSRs, a multimode (LPF/BPF/HPF) resonant analog filter, ring mod, sync, pulse width, external audio/analog input. Functionally it’s a 3-oscillator synth voice on a chip, but the oscillators can be played separately.