System Beeps by shiru8bit
Introduced with IBM PC model 5150 in 1981, designed to produce very basic system beeps, the humble PC Speaker never really had a chance to shine bright as a music device. Overshadowed by much more advanced sound chips of popular home game systems, quickly replaced with powerful sound cards, it mostly was used as a fallback option, playing severely downgraded content of better sound hardware. The best it got were a few nice tunes, and some software trickery to multichannel play software-synthesized or digitized music with heavy involvement of CPU. However, with careful composing and proper use of advanced chiptune techniques, it can do much more than one would normally expect from such a basic sound device that is only capable to play single square wave voice without volume control.
System Beeps is a music album in form of an MS-DOS program that features my original music composed for PC Speaker. You can run it on any MS-DOS compatible machine with 8088 or better, and listen to some music in the glorious monophonic square wave. All that you hear here was perfectly possible back in the day on the early XT machines.
Recorded from real hardware. No audio processing applied.
An in-depth 'making of' article: https://habr.com/en/post/439192/
Download MS-DOS program: http://shiru.untergrund.net/files/system_beeps.zip
See it running: https://youtu.be/tUy1MEpqbvk
Source code and Reaper project files: http://shiru.untergrund.net/files/system_beeps_src.zip
Tracklist
| 1. | System Beeps | 2:22 |
| 2. | Too Many Bits | 1:50 |
| 3. | Battery Low | 2:36 |
| 4. | Monoculear | 2:11 |
| 5. | Head Step | 2:36 |
| 6. | Bad Sector | 1:45 |
| 7. | Dial-Down | 2:35 |
| 8. | Handshake | 1:57 |
| 9. | Floppy Flips | 1:44 |
| 10. | Pixel Rain | 1:50 |
| 11. | Single-Sided Drive | 2:10 |
| 12. | Twinkle LED | 2:08 |
| 13. | Clocking Ticks | 1:57 |
| 14. | TX/RX | 3:28 |
| 15. | Serverside | 1:55 |
| 16. | Staff Roll | 2:31 |
| 17. | Astro Force | 1:30 |
| 18. | Run Under Fire | 1:44 |
| 19. | My Mission | 1:22 |
| 20. | Square Wave | 2:10 |
| 21. | Final Stretch | 1:47 |
| 22. | Coming Year | 2:11 |
| 23. | AONDEMO Soundtrack | 2:00 |
Credits
Composed and programmed by Shiru, July 2017 - January 2019.
License
CC BY 3.0. See the Creative Commons website for details.
An electronic music enthusiast who creates low tech, chiptune, and video game related music using old computers, consumer electronics, and low end synthesizers. Developer of various music software as well.