8BitBoy – A Flash-based Amiga Modplayer | Hacker News Reader

8BitBoy – A Flash-based Amiga Modplayer

8bitboy.popforge.de

76 pointsdrydot43 comments

No idea what music is exactly on the site but I, for one, love 8bit music and would like to take this opportunity to spam some links to various related websites in case TFA is relevant to your interests.

  CDs:
  https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/absolute-amiga-compilation/id436035771
  http://dataairlines.bandcamp.com/
  Actual mod, it, s3m etc. files:
  http://modarchive.org/
  http://www.keygenmusic.net/
  Demos:
  http://www.pouet.net/
  Artists:
  http://www.8bitweapon.com/
  http://kubbi.bandcamp.com/
  https://soundcloud.com/goto80
  http://gwem.bandcamp.com/
  https://soundcloud.com/sabrepulse
  http://047.se/
  Commodore64 music:
  http://www.hvsc.c64.org/
  https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.bitheap.sidplayer

There's also plenty of material on Spotify and Grooveshark. If you need a player, Audacious / Banshee / Foobar2k / ModPlug Player / mpd / VLC / Winamp / XimpleMOD... Many players will work, try your existing player if you're not using one of the aforementioned players.

Amiga game music: http://www.exotica.org.uk/

Player (for those obscure custom Amiga formats, can use Eagleplayer playroutines too, IIRC): http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Audio/Audio-Players/...

Online radio dedicated to demoscene music: https://www.scenemusic.net/demovibes/

That's great, thanks.

I was really surprized when I copy/pasted one of the links into AmaroK and it just started playing :)

also: http://www.slayradio.org/ (C64/Amiga chiptunes)

don't forget Kohina: http://kohina.net/

Music recorded entirely from original hardware: http://www.kohina.com/

And like nearly all audio players on the web it’s tiny. I don’t know what it is that causes all these players to be so tiny. They are often the central thing on their page – the thing people come to the page for – but they are nearly invisible. Practically all podcasters are especially egregious offenders.

Some are starting to get it. Soundcloud, terrible in every other way, at least has this really big player with a big and obvious play button. That’s how it’s done.

What's your resolution?

I like that it's small. It's meant to be heard, not seen.

1440×900 (logical) on a 15″ screen, so quite low.

I think it's a throwback to older tiny music players. Think Winamp.

Absolutely! Its a relic of a 90s skeuomorph! And the thing is Winamp didn't look so tiny when your screen resolution is 800x600, so mp3 players didn't catch-up (and a):

http://rustythinkpads.info/photos/380ED.jpg

http://www.crasseux.com/images/gnome2.png

(winamp clone for unix xmms)

It's interesting that the author chose to put the spectrum analyzer after the volume control. Usually media player visualizations are computed before the output gain is applied, to make them look the same regardless of playback volume.

Has anybody implemented a module player in JavaScript? I've always wanted to write one for fun; maybe I'll put a Web Audio version on my never-ending experimental projects list.

Yep, see gasman's JSModPlayer: http://jsspeccy.zxdemo.org/jsmodplayer/

That one still seems to depend on Flash for audio output.

If you like this, you might also enjoy http://remix.kwed.org/

It started blasting music right away, didn't read because annoyed.

Hint: disable Flash ... For security reasons as well as these annoyances.

What security reasons?

Don't forget http://keygenjukebox.com!

http://www.cyrilpereira.com/modplayer/

There was a definite style to a lot of e.g. game music on the amiga that made it feel quite unique both at the time and since, and listening to this reminds me of that style.

'the number of voices is limited to four. To have something similarly to chords, the three notes of it are repeated very fast. This makes MODs sound so freaky.'

This is possibly why this stuff sounds so unique. Interesting how a technical limitation can result in unintended stylistic consequences.

Actually, chiptunes (C64) and MODs (Amiga) used quite different playback technologies.

The C64 synthesized its sound via the MOS Technology 6581/8580 SID (Sound Interface Device). It was limited to 3 voices, so the only way to emulate chords on a single voice was to arpeggiate rapidly through a sequence of notes.

The Amiga used four PCM sample based sound channels (in stereo - two left, two right). So chords could easily be sampled and played back on one or more channels.

Chiptunes were limited to the distinctive '8 bit electronic' style - although it didn't stop groups like Maniacs of Noise pushing the technology to use primitive samples alongside the traditional sounds; one notable example was the 'Stormlord' soundtrack.

MODs, being sample-based, could be made to sound like quite respectable audio recordings. Even so, there were some musicians who tried to emulate the old C64 sound on the Amiga, hence the profusion of chiptune-sounding MODs.

RIP headphone users

Hm! Yes, very cool. But this is not how typical mod-files sounded. These sound more like chip-tunes (SID C64-style), whereas mod-files used quite a lot of samples. Think Fairlight stuff, Jean Michel Jarre's Zoolookologie...

My favorite MODs are still the ones from Star Control 2 :)

I remember that for my first PC, I bought a Pro AudioSpectrum card, which included Soundblaster compatibility. One of the things they included was a Modplayer. I can remember downloading a few mod files from Compuserve.

MODs were around (I'm pretty sure) years before Soundblaster. At that point there was really no way to create them on the PC. Pre-SB you could play them through the PC speaker, which was a tease because you could hear them, just not make them--without an Amiga. There was this thing called the STM format (ScreamTracker) that was an attempt to create MOD-like music on the PC. ScreamTracker wan't compatible with MOD though. Problem with ScreamTracker, it kinda worked but just barely--it was unstable. Also the Amiga was lightyears ahead of the PC so the STM format never really had a chance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scream_Tracker I think tracking on the PC got to be more popular later in the 90s with the rise of Drumnbass http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum_and_bass

The part of not being able to create them on a PC really is striking a chord. That sounds right.

I could be wrong, but I think Modedit 2 was the first PC app to make MODs. But it wasn't really floating around in the wild, maybe you had to be "elite" or something to even know about it, LOL. There's a guy in here who mentions Modedit 2, I didn't see anything in Google but I didn't look very hard http://www.inthemix.com.au/forum/archive/index.php/t-68295.h...

man, auto play music is instaclose tab.

man, flash is instapwn OS.

(I wouldn't be surprised anymore if the NSA has a backdoor in it, in addition to the continuously growing list of known security vulnerabilities.)

Seriously, can we have one thread without NSA?

Can we have a web without Flash (or any other proprietary plugin)?

god, it is really getting old ...

For those interested in a javascript/web audio api based mod player with a much more comprehensive list of formats, Flod may be of some interest to you http://www.photonstorm.com/flod

Awesome but the music on the website made me jump. Please turn off autoplay.

PAL or NTSC MOD timing? :)

But report: right clicked to access context menu, but it kept playing a short buffer instead of progressing through the song. Closing the context menu goes back to normal.

Why is no-one mentioning that the Amiga (at least basic models up until the 1200) was an 16bit computer? Something esoteric with audio chips??

Actually, 16/32-bit — the 68000's data bus and ALU were 16-bit, but the instruction set and register set were fully 32-bit.

Closed that tab as fast as humanly possible. Jeez, autoplaying blasting music? Come on.

03: 64-amiga-song is pretty cool rofl

I agree

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