The Light of Day

Bleepies!

Here are some BLEEPIES (click to listen) for your chin-stroking, “that’s innn-teresting”-type listening pleasure.

And here is a screenshot of the Commodore emulator I generated them on:

The reason it matters is because I actually did these same bleepies on a real C64 twenty years ago, as a way of “modernizing” the rhythm on Mana. I just never recorded it. Or saved my program. But what you see above is pretty much functionally identical, and it gave me great pleasure to resurrect it.

I used that Commodore 64 a lot when I was a kid. I did a couple of other sequenced songs, entirely in BASIC, using DATA statements to list all the pitches it would play, and empty FOR-NEXT loops to create pauses. Anything you wanted to do on the SID chip, be it pitch, volume, filters, envelopes, or waveforms, you had to use POKE statements, which made the code entirely unreadable by the human eye. You could even program it to behave like a real-time synthesizer, playable via the computer keyboard, as long as you were willing to play every note a little early to compensate for the lag. (I once tried bringing it along to band rehearsal, but it wasn’t terribly practical.)

So anyway … I’m not ruling out using this again, or possibly some friendlier software that emulates only the sound chip without forcing me to stare into the above headache-inducer. Stay tuned!