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Chiptune

chiptune.com

165 pointskarlzt29 comments

I remember 10 years ago Malcolm McLaren thought Swiss chip music would be the next punk rock.

http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.11/mclaren.html

It still might. Chip music and Demoscene/Trackerscene music is an unusually vibrant and prolific music scene that has almost no commercial ties to the music industry. It's sort of the most "indie" kind of music you can find, with people doing whatever they feel like for the most part, yet still has some recognizable cultural threads.

That was a beautiful response.

Given how varied music is now, I don't think anything recent has been as big as punk, although elements of chip music have certainly slipped into mainstream music by the back door (Ke$ha, Calvin Harris, Robyn, Timbaland).

Is there a way to actually play chiptunes within the shell, or can you only download them? Seems like it's sort of missing its core competency if there's no WebAudio implementation of a tracker.

I'm currently working on a web tracker, and it turns out that it is /much/ easier said than done. You have all the problems of making a web app, coupled with all the problems of making a tracker (of which there are many). Plus, you seem to be suggesting a one-stop allgear tracker, which makes it ten times worse, since one doesn't seem to exist even for desktop yet.

And, a shoutout to, IMO, one of the coolest quasi-demoscene places on the internet, http://battleofthebits.org. Without them, I would never have gotten my feet off the ground with coding.

And, if anyone's curious (it's still in its incredibly early stages), https://github.com/ianremsen/lunartracker

Admittedly, it'd be easier to just render all the audio to MP3, stick it on S3 (6000 chips = ~70GB of music?), and create a tracker interface that actually just streams those MP3s. Costly on bandwidth, though.

As a showcase for the MP3 approach, for C64 music there's this [1] that has more than 50000 tracks recorded from actual SID chips (because the emulators are still not perfect, apparently...). That includes a lot of pointless stuff, though (they've played back every track available, which includes game over jingles and sound effects in many cases).

[1 http://www.6581-8580.com/

> (because the emulators are still not perfect, apparently...)

The SID chips contain analog synthesizers that have a very distinct tone which is difficult to emulate in digital signal processing. There was also a lot of variance in the semiconductor manufacturing process, so no two SID chips sound exactly the same.

The SID emulators are actually very different from your typical audio synths, they don't run at the "native" output sample rate (ie. 44.1 or 48kHz) but do their processing at a much higher (closer to MHz) sample rate to better emulate some of the analog phenomena going on in the chip.

So, no, SID chips are still not "perfect" and will probably never be :)

The SID chip can do surprisingly fat bass sounds.

http://208.70.31.85/OAKVALLEY/soasc/soasc_mp3/MUSICIANS/D/Du...

I've been a huge fan of this chip since I was a kid :)

There's way more than 6,000 chiptunes ;)

Here's a site with just Amiga music and it has just over a quarter million songs.

http://www.paula8364.com/

Sure; I was going by the number of chips listed in this particular site's archive.

Mmm, pretty. I had a similar project a couple years ago attempting to replicate OpenMPT's interface in the web browser: https://github.com/jdm/domtracker and http://www.joshmatthews.net/domtracker/; it played sounds in earlier versions of FF and Chromium but I haven't upgraded it to keep abreast of newer WebAudio implementations.

You can give my web tracker Scriptracker a try at http://scriptracker.cheerful.nl

One thing to note if you've never used an Amiga is that you can pick up the white bar at the top and drag it up and down to reveal a screen behind it. This was what passed for entertainment in those days.

I'm not sure what you mean by the last sentence. That wasn't entertainment. That was an ultra handy feature which I miss to this day. You could have several fullscreen applications, switch between them easily or just have a peek onto what's going on by dragging the screen down a little bit. It's like a tiled desktop on steroids. Amiga's Multitasking was great (considering the resources).

Oh, just an admission that when you pull the workbench down, what you find might not be very exciting :)

I'm not sure what I'm looking at. Hints?

A pretty good emulation of AmigaOS ~1.3 from the late 1980s.

This site has been around for a long time and is related to the oldskool demoscene (http://pouet.net) and chiptune music scene (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GH7eUlri4yM).

Unfortunately, apart from the neat OS emulation, it does a rather poor job at communicating what it is about or linking to interesting samples of the art.

Awesome compilation! Thanks for the link. I randomly went on a chiptune binge on YouTube a week ago to see what I could find. I made a submission [1] of a video (Black Light Machine [2]) I found because I thought the visualization was really interesting, and the music was really well composed. It's a fascinating genre of music. One of the original sources where I discovered it was on Linus Akesson's website [3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8873614

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik8Bv8KMk7E

[3] http://www.linusakesson.net/

I just noticed the Shadow of the Beast demo (SOTB), this is one of the quintessential Amiga games. Wonderful art and music (also rock-hard difficulty).

Not long ago the game was ported to popular modern formats, for anyone interested: http://www.indieretronews.com/2014/10/shadow-of-beast-legacy...

unfortunately, since that article was written, the guy doing the porting has slowed right down. The most up to date info can be found in the EAB forum thread

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=74013&page=11

This website brings back so many memories, both of first discovering it, and before that my time on the Amiga.

F11 your browser, open 'Starfield' from Demos, resize window to fullscreen, travel through space: http://i.imgur.com/twSrcy0.png

Mousewheel appears to control speed. Wouldn't've thought the Amiga had a mousewheel...

So much nostalgia, just spent the rest of the morning listening to various chiptune's on Spotify.

Check out radio Nectarine if you like this kind of music!

or Slay Radio -> http://www.slayradio.org or the Bitjam Podcast -> http://www.bitfellas.org/page.php?100

awesome, thx!

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