The Sound of 1-bit: Musical Creativity on the 48k Sinclair ZX Spectrum (2017) | Hacker News Reader

The Sound of 1-bit: Musical Creativity on the 48k Sinclair ZX Spectrum (2017)

gamejournal.it

63 pointsbeagle325 comments

Glad to see this topic getting attention on HN! I just finished a post about 1-bit music a few days ago: https://zserge.com/posts/1-bit-music/

Some examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtSRhIM4oaQ

Pretty impressive given the limitations, but not very pleasant compared to e.g. the C64 SID.

I managed to get 8 octaves of tones out of a ZX-81 in my youth without any extra hardware. Bit banging the cassette port audio out and running that output into line in worked. Wasn't amazing and boring organ tone at best and would use a fair chunk of the CPU. But like most thinks was a case of fellow school friends boasting about their zx-spectrum with audio, one just don't take that sitting down.

It's not only the cheapo Sinclair Spectrum that had to make do with this "1-bit" sound, the much more expensive IBM PC didn't have better sound hardware "out of the box" either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_speaker

I don't remember it being widely used for music, but some games did a pretty good job with it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSvj3Hjxiic

The 8088MPH demo also sounds surprisingly good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNRO7lno_DM

High quality PC-speaker music https://youtu.be/Xqjs1SPF9KY

In high school, I built a 1-bit sound board for the Sinclair ZX-80, programmed in machine code to play musically tuned delay loops for notes. This was inspired by noticing AM radio interference as sounds corresponding to program execution. Highlight was getting it to play “Yankee Doodle” for a science fair. Think I still have it in a box somewhere, will look.

I always was a Sinclair guy, even developed some cracking (tape copier) software back in `80s (youth crime, I know).

I also had friends who owned a C64. Someday, a friend let me listen to another 1 bit sound that was produced by ..... the C64 diskdrive!

I was really flabbergasted by that hack!

It's a very interesting article but yes, they need to lead with at least some youtube links to actual examples of what they're explaining otherwise you might as well just put up the PDF and nothing else.

In the 1990's I serviced computer printers and monitors. Juki made a daisy wheel printer called the 6100. It was unique in that it used mag-lev to suspend the print head. It came to mind regarding this story because someone had written software to convert the Juki 6100 to a graphics printer, using the Period Key Only. It printed at 18 characters per second, try to imagine how slow that is.

I hope you had a printer hood! Those things were deafening!

Pulse width modulation of the PC speaker was also a thing back in the 1990s. ModPlay under DOS could use the PC speaker as an output to play back Amiga MOD files, although it was very quiet. I ended up making a bunch of parallel port DACs in high school for friends so they could play MODs with a higher sound quality. Good times!

Here’s a classic by Tim Follin

https://youtu.be/u-D24A_N4d4

For me technically the most impressive was the title screen of Dark Fusion:

https://youtu.be/gXe51IsT2xs

They even scroll stars in the playback routine

Here's a SID cover by Linus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shj1_T68SBo

Some years ago I actually owned a ZX Spectrum and I managed to run some demos on it loaded via my PC audio out. I'm still searching for that one great track it played.

It sounded similar to this tune: https://youtu.be/QZnOd_f9YjQ?t=371

Love the idea of this ... Please lead with the music and then explain it. You lost me after the 7th paragraph.

I have never understood why having a 1-bit DAC in a CD player was something to brag about.

Because controlling timing of signals is easier than controlling level. You can take advantage of the fast and low-jitter clocks already made for digital electronics.

If you have a multi-bit DAC, it's difficult to made it linear. With a 1-bit DAC, it's much easier, because you only have two possible output values. And if you run it fast enough, you can apply a simple analog low-pass filter to the output and convert speed to bit-depth.

This is great, but man, it could really have benefitted from some inline audio.

The nice thing about 1-bit music is that you automatically win the loudness war

aaaaahhhhhhhh the GOOOOD OLD TIMES!!!

how i miss them!!!

No cellphones, no internet...

Hey Hey 16K

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d8UfQn3BEg

TLDR where is the music

That's exactly what i was also looking for :)

it's in a new tab when you type something like "sinclair agent x music" into duck duck google

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