Monkey Island PC-speaker music player

[nyanpasu64]

Oddly this sounds more like a 40% pulse wave than a 50% square wave. I assume the original was played on a 50% square wave.

EDIT: Upon reading the original code:

    int volume = 60;
    periodMicros = 1000000/((long)freq);
    onMicros = periodMicros * volume/100;
    offMicros = periodMicros * (100-volume)/100;

volume doesn't control the volume, but the duty cycle (timbre and harmonic content) of the waveform. And it looks like I guessed the 40% (audibly equivalent to 60%) duty cycle exactly!

[endymi0n]

I just love how good us humans can get at nichy distinction topics if we just keep at the task long enough (and start early).

We once had a film crew in our school trying to get some shots of us at the computer. I overheard them having big problems getting the CRT flicker free on camera and trying to find out the refresh rate.

I was maybe 12 at the time and just told them point blank it‘s 60Hz. They asked me how I knew and I just told them I could see it from the feel of the flicker. Was a good guess as well since it was one of the standard VESA frame rates.

The cameraman came back to that kid 3 minutes later, showing me the shutter set to exactly 59.7 Hz with a still very surprised face.

[ttsiodras]

Spot on! I planned initially to control the volume with a potentiometer - but abandoned the plan when I got to the "sounds good enough" :-)

[SamBam]

Can you tell me what you're hearing? I don't recall the original music well enough, but this one sounds slightly muddy -- would a 50% square waves sounds crisper?

[rosstex]

Is there a website for experimenting with waves and duty cycles and observing how the sound changes?

[sgt]

You've got a good ear!

[rob74]

BTW, if you want to compare the Monkey Island title music for all platforms the game was ported to (and some it wasn't ported to, looking at you C64), take a look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DydmYhaL7zw

For me, the Amiga version brings back the fondest memories - 4 channels of glorious 8-bit sampled sound! Unfortunately two of those channels were hardwired to the left speaker and two to the right speaker, so listening with headphones is not so great, but still...

[belorn]

I kind of prefer this other video by LGR on the subject of monkey island title music through different PC music devices. It does not have the commodore 64 as it only cover PC, it more devices and illustrate how different the same song is on same platform with different hardware.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a324ykKV-7Y

[ant6n]

It's amazing how the PC speaker version has a Melody, but also chords and accompaniment, even though only one frequency can be played at a time. There's so much going on it sounds impossible.

I really wanna know how this was done, presumably by offsetting all the various sounds. Maybe very short notes jumping around, perhaps the raggae style off-beats help.

There's a big documentary on Monkey island on YouTube, unfortunately it doesn't go much into the music.

[eumoria]

Monkey Island on the MT-32 is amazing. I believe it was composed on that device but it's such an awesome sound.

[cmiller1]

Additionally since this game as well as many others from the era can be configured to output MIDI data you can buy new midi hardware and continue to hear how we've developed this kind of sampling! https://twitter.com/GyoJc/status/1304638489313644546

[jedberg]

For a time when stereo was new for recorded music, the Beatles and the Doors both like to really play with that ability. They would put some tracks on just one ear, so that only the people with the latest stereo equipment could truly enjoy the work as intended.

[blt]

One of the most bizarre design decisions of the home computer era.

[agys]

Slightly unrelated but MBR (Master Boot Record, @masterbootrec on Twitter) made 42 covers of classic game songs in heavy-metal chiptune style.

Among the many fantastic pieces covered you’ll also find the Monkey Island theme.

The whole pack is available for free:

http://mbrserver.com/warez.zip

Please also appreciate the retro-ansi-gfx style of his productions!

[Razengan]

Even though it was supposed to be mostly parody, Monkey Island instills a sense of adventure that few other games have (like King’s Quest).

The semi-open island hopping of MI2 was specially fun. I still wonder if there will be an open-world game like Skyrim or Fallout etc. that is spread across islands instead of an endless landmass.

Too bad LucasArts got gobbled up by the D Demon and Monkey Island will probably never get another revival because it cannibalizes Pirates of the Caribbean.

Unless Ron Gilbert et al. can pull off a Thimbleweed Park with it.. ;)

[jonplackett]

Original Monkey Island theme is still my favourite bit of music from a game ever.

[thaumasiotes]

I just finished transcribing it from a dumped midi file - https://musescore.com/user/36584999/scores/6891053 .

I wouldn't mind figuring out how to get a midi to sound like the PC speaker. Setting a square wave synthesizer as the instrument doesn't do it.

[geephroh]

If you really want to geek out on the music, the Super Marcato Brothers podcast has done episodes on MI2 - MI4.[1]

(And fwiw, my brother plays marimba and other percussion in MI4. To this day, one of the weirdest gigs he's ever had.)

1. http://www.supermarcatobros.com/podcast/tag/monkey+island

[jug]

Lovely cover here, recommended by Ron Gilbert himself: https://youtu.be/qUMKy2Jk3Oo

[detritus]

I have it as a default ohrwurm, with ot regularly popping into mind as a background theme for hours on end, but I don't mind - it's better than the other wurms...

My young daughter will grow up with a vague knowledge of it as it - along with the theme to Monty Python's flying Circus - are the two tunes I hum to her to get her to sleep.

[the_af]

The Last Ninja (C64 version) holds that title in my heart. If you like it, do check out the rock remixes by a band called the Fastloaders (a live performance also features Ben Daglish, the original composer of some of the tracks. RIP, sadly).

[xattt]

I’ve been wondering for a while. What tools were used to compose PC beeper music? Was there some sort of DAW or toolkit, or was the music all hard coded as a text file?

[phire]

Based on interviews, Lucas Arts were using common MIDI tools and composition software.

The real magic happens in their music driver, which takes the sound effects, multi-track MIDI music, along with track priority infomation and dynamically down-mixes it to however many tracks the current audio device has. Just one in the case of the PC speaker.

I assume they would have had a setup that allowed them to quickly hear what the track sounded like on all their target audio devices.

[singlow]

I don't know of any toolkits used by the pc speaker games. I did enjoy some videos on YouTube from the 8-bit Guy recently that had some good info though:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_3d1x2VPxk

[megameter]

By the late 1980's early versions of Cubase et al. existed. These were not yet DAWs in the modern sense(while there were some very early high-end examples of multitrack digital audio, that phenomenon waited until memory and storage were cheaper) but they were competent sequencers and could drive MIDI devices easily. Building up a MIDI sequence and then exporting that to the game engine format was the preferred workflow for the studios on PC attempting full scores(rather than "tunes and jingles") starting in this timeframe since it offered the flexibility of hiring traditional composers who could record in from a keyboard and then do some cleanup and edits for the target device as needed, including simplified beeper versions.

The tracker music/custom sequencer formats operated in a parallel universe alongside the MIDI workflow and were more often the provenance of scrappy demosceners and independents who saw an opportunity to completely control the output quality(as long as it was sample-based). Not everyone literally used a tracker type of workflow and there are examples like MML(Music Macro Language) as another idea of source formats, as well as the low-level "enter hexcodes in a machine language monitor while the playback routine is running" (used by some C64 composers.) If you played a DOS game made with QBasic it probably used the PLAY statement to control the beeper, with an MML-style syntax. This style of syntax would appear again with programmable mobile ringtones.

In the mid-90's the balance shifted again towards CD audio, ushering in simple drum loop sequences as the quick-and-dirty audio filler of choice, and everything since then has largely been variations on that theme with more tracks and processing.

[k__]

I read, back in the days, "trackers" were used for electronic music composition. But I don't know if that was the case for game music.

[darkwater]

This reminds me of how I was used to this music while playing MI on my PS/2 and how I was blown away the day I installed an adlib-compatible soundcard (the cheapest I could find with my 11yo money) and the first game I tried was Monkey Island.

It's one of those memories that will stay with me forever.

[eloeffler]

The important question at hand here: When and how did you expose your nieces and nephews to Monkey Island and how did you introduce it to them? :D

I would really like to share this experience with kids I know but I find it hard to find the right time and way to show it to them and to get them to play. Did you play it with them? Or just show it to them? On a computer or a phone?

I'm so curious O:)

Awesome project, too!

[ttsiodras]

I played the game with them, when they were very young. They loved every minute of it - with their uncle performing impromptu dramatization-translations :-)

I am seriously considering playing it again with them this summer :-D

[kabouseng]

Monkey Island 1 and 2 is available on steam, even remastered if I remember correctly, to not damage their modern sensitive eyes that is used to high resolution graphics... Another recommended remaster is Full throttle...also available on steam and Xbox.

[godot]

Oh man, I'm sure only people who've actually played the games back then can relate, but I got literal goosebumps upon hearing that music when I played that video. I think the fact that it's played from a PC speaker added that much more level of nostalgia.

[ggambetta]

This brings up memories :)

My mind was completely blown away by the early MOD players that somehow managed to play relatively high res music through the speaker. I have a vivid memory of playing Axel F and being in total disbelief!

[holoduke]

I am looking for an old mod player from 1990-3 Called something like fli player. With a full screen modus where you see 3 circles red green and blue. Already looking for it for about 15 years. If I could only find that player.

[jug]

Yeah, I remember playing Suburbia myself, vocals and all. Melted my brain at the time!

[shadowgovt]

It can be easy sometimes, sitting where we do now in the era of smartphones and globe-spanning networks, to forget that teaching sand to think has been hard.

Videogames required a lot of trickery to do what developers wanted them to do. And they succeeded.

(As a fun parenthetical, it's enjoyable to consider that the studio that produced this game was LucasArts. This was one of the projects Lucas had his game studio create because he was gunshy about whether they could produce games that would enrich or dilute the Star Wars brand. He wanted them to do original IP first to verify they were, first and foremost, game creators. The studio's first published game was 1985, this game came out in 1990, and 1991 would see their first Star Wars game released).

[egypturnash]

There is also the fact that Lucas had licensed the game rights to Star Wars to Kenner along with the toys, in a deal that was very much in Kenner's favor. As long as Kenner paid them either 5% of their yearly profits on Star Wars toys and games or 100k, the deal would continue. They finally stopped paying in 1991.

https://www.filfre.net/2021/02/the-second-coming-of-star-war...

[Andrew_nenakhov]

Of all DOS games I ever played, by far the coolest PC speaker music was in Star Control 2. Unfortunately (understandably) it was not loud enough, but it was great.

MI music is great though, I speak it as a person who has LeChuck fanfare on a ringtone.

[AnotherGoodName]

I was going to post the same thing about Star Control 2. I found a video to highlight it. https://youtu.be/nj8j7IGQP6E?t=188

It needs to be emphasized that the game had hours of music. Every different race encountered, every mode of travel and even different planet types had different music. All through a PC Speaker and would run on a 286. The game was a technical marvel for the time.

[tluyben2]

Off topic somewhat: just playing through the Monkey Island enhanced versions on Steam. Still great stuff.

[code_duck]

It’s rather sad that this was the music in these otherwise excellent 80s PC games when earlier machines such as the Commodore 64 or even 8 bit contemporaries like the NES and Sega Master System had far superior audio capabilities. PC games for the most part skipped a lovely era of synthesized music.

[MrBuddyCasino]

Building little audio gizmos is fun. I recommend using replacement smartphone speakers (eg for the iPhone SE 2020) if size is an issue, because a bare chassis without an enclosure sounds like crap due to acoustic short-circuit.

Another option is LCD TV speakers, those already have an enclosure but are a bit larger.

[zxcvgm]

I had the same idea! Except that I wanted to do it for Xenon 2 Megablast. It was a DOS game I grew up with and loved the intro music, so much that I wanted to play it outside the computer.

You can run it in the browser here to listen to the intro music: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Xenon_2_-_Megablast_1990

Thanks for posting this! I'll refer to it when I finally get around to making it.

[ricardo81]

The pertinent question perhaps: How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

Hopefully the grand kids appreciate the theory/use of Huffman!

[ttsiodras]

:-)

Well, if the bird in question used an LZ77 followed by Huffman, he could compress all that wood/chuck stuff down to almost nothing. So he could chuck a lot :-D

[preinheimer]

Even if a wood chuck could chuck wood, would a wood chuck chuck wood?

[mnw21cam]

Isn't that in Monkey Island 2?

[codetrotter]

Wait, is it just me or does either of these two more recent songs sound a lot like the first one of those Monkey Island songs?

ItaloBrothers - Stamp on the ground. 2009. https://youtu.be/cHcVU5cGUNE

Basshunter - DotA. 2008. https://youtu.be/qTsaS1Tm-Ic

[robert-boehnke]

I don't hear it myself but you might be interested to learn that the DotA song derives from 2000's Daddy DJ by the band of the same name https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flL_2awF-QI

[SamPatt]

Curse of Monkey Island (the third one, more cartoony than pixel) is one of my all time favorite games.

Hilariously fun to play.