Re: Apple II music?

[bloomer_au <bloomer@iprimus.com.au>]

For a 1-bit system, people managed to get the Apple II to create music
in several quite expressive modes. There were the pure tones (1 note
at a time), the mewly tones (Karateka, The Goonies - 1 note at a time,
but with constant expression changes) then the 2-voice timbres of
Electric Duet, and even more voices than that with Music Construction
Set (though I don't think they were 'genuine' in their 3 voices etc.
the way Duet was genuine with 2). I'm not aware that anything as
organic sounding was ever wrangled out of the pure tones of a PC
speaker or any other computer with 1-bit sound.

There's also a gent on this list (sorry, forget name) who devised an
even better method of 1-bit sampling, and has a program you can run on
your apple iie which will play unbelievably good sounding string
samples (EG Cello) as you tap keys.

Re: games to mention, I think you guys have already mentioned most of
the cool music, but here's my own reprise, including such technical
terms as 'mewly' ;)

- Prince of Persia (the whole score) (2+ voices, exotic - awesome!)
- Karateka (the whole score) (1 voice, mewly)
- Goonies intro (1 voice, mewly, tortured cover of Cyndi Lauper's
theme song)
- Archon intro (2 voices, very petite sounding but cool track)
- Bruce Lee (2 voices, v cool intro)
- Adventure Construction Set (pure tones, a soundtrack with 30
different pieces, all good compositions)
- Summer/Winter/World Games (2+ voices, the national anthems of many
countries)
- Lucifer's Realm (intro is 2-voice menuet from Electric Duet)
- Gremlins (opens with boxy 2 voice rendition of Jerry Goldsmith's
theme song)
- Microwave (cool in-game soundtrack, including Cantina from Star
Wars)
- Jungle Hunt (1 voice, neat theme song and new game riff)
- Bard's Tales (1-2 voices, 6-7 bard songs in each of 3 games)
- Electric Duet (Tool used to create 2 voice music, disk comes with
probably 30 classical+pop covers)

-Ghostbusters

*In some cases, what took all CPU time on the Apple was hearable all
the time in-game on the Commodore 64, and that always pissed me off
after I returned from playing such a game at a friend's house. So for
instance on the apple, you'd hear the ghostbusters theme at the start
only, but on the C64 it played all the way through. Same goes for -

Zorro (unexciting music anyway)
Rocky Horror Show (ugh - the apple version is almost silent! no in-
game Time Warp!)