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Monkey Island PC-speaker music player
- darkwater 5y agoThis 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.
- jonplackett 5y agoOriginal Monkey Island theme is still my favourite bit of music from a game ever.
- thaumasiotes 5y agoI just finished transcribing it from a dumped midi file - https://musescore.com/user/36584999/scores/6891053 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.
- jonplackett 5y agoNice work! There's more going on in there than I expected!
- thaumasiotes 5y agoInterestingly, the music is different based on the audio you select. If you listen to the PC speaker version of the theme, you might notice that the final note is arpeggiated, which isn't true for the midi version. The PC speaker version is also missing a note in the previous measure that exists in the midi. Then when the opening credits have finished and the game begins, there is background music for the lookout if you have midi audio, but silence for the PC speaker.
- maxime-esa 5y agoAnd there is an amazing piano transcription from w3sp, here: http://www.gamemusicthemes.com/sheetmusic/personalcomputer/thesecretofmonkeyisland/index.html http://www.gamemusicthemes.com/sheetmusic/personalcomputer/t... (check out his performance on youtube - not only the intro, but also the complete Woodtick theme, Jojo from MI2, etc.)
- detritus 5y agoI 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 5y agoThe 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).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Cybotron5000 5y agoLast Ninja’s music was super cool also! …had completely forgotten about that game - going to check out the Fastloaders asap :)
- geephroh 5y agoIf 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 http://www.supermarcatobros.com/podcast/tag/monkey+island
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jug 5y agoLovely cover here, recommended by Ron Gilbert himself: https://youtu.be/qUMKy2Jk3Oo https://youtu.be/qUMKy2Jk3Oo
- MrBuddyCasino 5y agoBuilding 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.
- Tempest1981 5y agoAh, clever, like this? https://www.ebay.com/itm/372798620272 https://www.ebay.com/itm/372798620272 ($6) So then how do you attach/enclose this tiny speaker?
- MrBuddyCasino 5y agoThis looks like the speaker that goes into your ear, but I meant the one at the bottom of your phone that activates when you switch to "speaker phone". They usually have the keyword "buzzer" in the title of sites that sell them to distinguish them from the earpiece. This is what I mean: https://www.mmobiel.com/loud-speaker-for-iphone-8-plus-series-5.5-ringer-buzzer-flex-cable-replacement https://www.mmobiel.com/loud-speaker-for-iphone-8-plus-serie... Some have just two contacts you can easily solder speaker cables to, just avoid the ones with complicated connectors. You don't need to enclose it to get good sound, it already has an enclosure. I often choose plush toys with a simple MP3 SD player (1€ on Aliexpress, eg https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32657798948.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32657798948.html) and some triggering mechanism.
- eloeffler 5y agoThe 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!
- kabouseng 5y agoMonkey 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.
- nmg 5y agoBig ups to full throttle, cinematic and fun, beautiful art & animation & voice acting, a game for kids that felt like it was made for grown ups - and vice versa.
- ttsiodras 5y agoI 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
- eloeffler 5y agoCool, have fun then! I think I first played them at the age of 7 or 8. I bet the dramatization-translations must be the trick :) It's like an animated story book.
- codetrotter 5y agoWait, 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 https://youtu.be/cHcVU5cGUNE Basshunter - DotA. 2008. https://youtu.be/qTsaS1Tm-Ic https://youtu.be/qTsaS1Tm-Ic
- robert-boehnke 5y agoI 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flL_2awF-QI
- codetrotter 5y agoI love that song but never knew that the DotA song derives from it. Neat!
- ggambetta 5y agoThis 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!
- drKarl 5y agoOr Klisje para klisje
- abbeyj 5y agoA classic: https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=47057 https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu... There's a web-based player so you can hear this MOD without having to download anything.
- jug 5y agoYeah, I remember playing Suburbia myself, vocals and all. Melted my brain at the time!
- holoduke 5y agoI 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.
- alfonsodev 5y agoSo great and standalone, this should be added to ATMs, vending machines and the like :) Also could be added to your house ring bell ?
- rob74 5y agoI had it as a ringtone for a while (not the PC speaker version mind you)...
- jonplackett 5y agoWhat is the device between the battery and the board?
- ttsiodras 5y agoA USB tester - it just reports the voltage (5V) and the current. As you can see in the video, the current hovers around 10mA, spiking to 20mA when we use the speaker.
- ricardo81 5y agoThe 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!
- mnw21cam 5y agoIsn't that in Monkey Island 2?
- ricardo81 5y agoIt is
- preinheimer 5y agoEven if a wood chuck could chuck wood, would a wood chuck chuck wood?
- ttsiodras 5y ago:-) 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
- Razengan 5y agoEven 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.. ;)
- gwbas1c 5y ago(Meta) If you can, try to make the video louder. I really had to crank up the volume to listen to it. (Probably use a combination of normalize and compress in Audacity.) Cool hack!
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoI think the speaker is too big and / or the circuit doesn't have an amplifier, so that would be an improvement; the USB power supply should have enough juice left over to crank up the volume.
- ttsiodras 5y agoMostly, my mistake was I had the phone too far away - notice in the video that when I get it close, it sounds just fine. Live and learn :-)
- xattt 5y agoI’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?
- k__ 5y agoI 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.
- Sharlin 5y agoA lot of game music was also composed with trackers, including some big titles like the original Unreal and others using its engine such as Deus Ex. But tracker music is all about arranging digital samples on a multi-track timeline, requiring an audio output that can play digitized multi-channel sound in the first place…
- nitrogen 5y agoScream Tracker 3 did have an Adlib output mode, and there were a few .s3m files out there that used Adlib FM instruments instead of sampled instruments.
- addingnumbers 5y agoStar Control 2 famously used music composed in MOD trackers, they even had part of the UI show a waveform of the music during dialog with the aliens. It was seeing a bunch of .MOD files on the floppy that first prompted me to download a mod tracker back in the BBS days.
- camtarn 5y agoHaha, yeah - many years later, finding the .IT files in the original Unreal Tournament and downloading a tracker was what got me into composing music on the PC. It was wonderful having the music available in such a reverse-engineerable format.
- rob74 5y agoBTW, 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 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...
- ant6n 5y agoIt'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.
- Sharlin 5y agoThere even used to be a driver for Win 3.x that allowed playing digitized sound via the PC speaker as if it was a real soundcard. It was (unsurprisingly) very CPU intensive so not useful for games.
- Joe_Cool 5y agoCheck out the title theme from Maniac Mansion. Someone at Lucasfilm Games knew what they were doing with the PC Speaker. They had great musicians. The dynamic iMuse music in Monkey Island 2 and Tie Fighter (only in the DOS/MIDI version) was incredible.
- Cybotron5000 5y agoHere’s a great article by Kenneth McAlpine: https://www.gamejournal.it/the-sound-of-1-bit-technical-constraint-as-a-driver-for-musical-creativity-on-the-48k-sinclair-zx-spectrum/ https://www.gamejournal.it/the-sound-of-1-bit-technical-cons... …An interview with Michael Land and Clint Bajakian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0EqG6RYn9Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0EqG6RYn9Y …an article about iMuse (used from M.I.2 I think): https://mixnmojo.com/features/sitefeatures/LucasArts-Secret-History-Monkey-Island-2-LeChucks-Revenge/9 https://mixnmojo.com/features/sitefeatures/LucasArts-Secret-... Hope that helps! (this site is amazing btw… :)
- hereforphone 5y agoI probably would have loved this game series. I couldn't play very long because I found the constant ™ after words intrusive and definitely an impediment to immersion. I can't be the only one.
- tommek4077 5y agoYou f̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ talk like a dairy Farmer! ™
- chucky 5y agoIt's a joke that probably made a lot more sense in the 90s. Back then people would use ™ everywhere, in logos, whenever certain brands were mentioned, etc. In my opinion it fits the general humor of the game perfectly, but I can definitely see how it would could be annoying.
- hereforphone 5y agoWow, that was a joke? Did everyone but me just 'get' that, or was it a meme at the time (discussed regularly in forums) and I just wasn't in on it? But still annoying.
- egypturnash 5y agoI was nineteen when the game came out and I got that joke. It's an important part of selling the broader joke that the world of Monkey Island is probably more of a pirate-themed amusement park, owned by a faceless corporation, than it is an actual world.
- hereforphone 5y agoInteresting, thanks.
- pcthrowaway 5y agoJust to weight in here, I completely got that also. I probably would have played somewhere in the mid-90s, when I was ~11-13. As far as I knew, forums didn't even exist at the time (Of course, there probably were forums, and of course mailing lists and usenet were around before that, but I didn't know about them). It really just fit the humour style of the game, not taking itself too seriously. To be honest, it was far from the funniest joke in the game.
- code_duck 5y agoIt’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.
- motogpjimbo 5y agoBy way of compensation however, a few years later PC gamers could enjoy the FM synthesis of the Sound Blaster card or the PCM-based sounds of sound modules like the Roland Sound Canvas. A lot of PC game soundtracks from that era have aged very well and have become classics in their own right.
- Joe_Cool 5y agoThe Wing Commander 1 title theme on MT-32 is absolutely amazing.
- city41 5y agoMost PC games from this era supported the Ad Lib, Roland MT-32, Soundblaster, etc. Here is the game from the post running on DOS with various sound cards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr-84mjV3CI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr-84mjV3CI
- code_duck 5y agoThose do sound pretty nice. I wonder what the usage rate was for enhanced sound hardware. None of the systems I used up to the mid 90s had anything besides the PC speaker, even in the VGA era.
- city41 5y agoNot sure what the usage rate was. But the devices saw pretty wide support. For example the Roland was supported by 900 games, same with the Soundblaster Roland: https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/dos/tic,1/ti,35/ https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/dos/tic,1/ti,35/ Soundblaster: https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/dos/tic,1/ti,40/ https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/dos/tic,1/ti,40/
- nyanpasu64 5y agoOddly 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!
- sgt 5y agoYou've got a good ear!
- ttsiodras 5y agoSpot on! I planned initially to control the volume with a potentiometer - but abandoned the plan when I got to the "sounds good enough" :-)
- SamBam 5y agoCan 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?
- nyanpasu64 5y agoI used to make chiptune (and still do to some extent). Pulse waves (periodically alternating high and low sound pressures) are a type of waveform, and the width or duty cycle of the waveform (the percent of the time the sound pressure is high rather than low) controls the harmonic spectrum and perceived timbre. I could identify by listening that it was greater than 25% but less than 50% by listening by ear, and hone in on a guess by comparing to FamiTracker's emulated VRC6 (which can output duty cycles between 6.25% and 50% in steps of 6.25%). I don't know what you mean by "muddy", but I did notice the speaker (perhaps mic too) has a crappy frequency response, and the bass notes are quiet and difficult to identify the pitch of.
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- shadowgovt 5y agoIt 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 5y agoThere 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-wars/ https://www.filfre.net/2021/02/the-second-coming-of-star-war...
- tluyben2 5y agoOff topic somewhat: just playing through the Monkey Island enhanced versions on Steam. Still great stuff.
- SamBam 5y agoWhat a great write-up. A huge amount of tricky concepts in a single project. This seems like it could be the capstone project for an advanced microcontrollers course. And, as someone who wants to program in more embedded systems, it tells me how high the cliffs are ahead of me...
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoOf 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 5y agoI was going to post the same thing about Star Control 2. I found a video to highlight it. https://youtu.be/nj8j7IGQP6E?t=188 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.
- Amin699 5y agoIf you have fun fooling around with electronics - as I do - you probably play a lot with microcontrollers. One of the first things you learn, is that these tiny beasts (from the ATtiny all the way to the ESP32) will suffer from brown-outs if you try to drive too much current from them.
- agys 5y agoSlightly 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 http://mbrserver.com/warez.zip Please also appreciate the retro-ansi-gfx style of his productions!
- pierrebai 5y agoI wonder if using RLE encoding would not have been but vastly simpler and more compact that the huffman encoding used. Just frequency + duration.
- camtarn 5y agoThe notes were already encoded as frequency and duration. The Huffman coding was required to get that down to an even smaller size. RLE might have helped for repeated notes - but I guess Huffman coding kinda compensates for that anyway, in the repeated notes will probably end up with shorter bit strings.
- ttsiodras 5y ago> I wonder if using RLE encoding would not have been but vastly simpler and more compact... No, mate - it wouldn't. Don't be confused by the "printf"-dump; the Python script processed it into pairs of (frequency,delay). That is, when you see... 989 Hz @ 15209 989 Hz @ 15213 989 Hz @ 15218 784 Hz @ 15222 784 Hz @ 15226 ...the data actually generated are: (989, 15222-15209), (784, ... -15222), Simply put: RLE can't do anything on them. The repetition has already been "cleaned out". I wouldn't have gone to Huffman compression if I had a simpler choice.
- tallmansixfour 5y agoCount me as simply impressed.
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- godot 5y agoOh 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.
- easymovet 5y agoBrought a tear to my eye, so nostalgic.
- SamPatt 5y agoCurse of Monkey Island (the third one, more cartoony than pixel) is one of my all time favorite games. Hilariously fun to play.
- zxcvgm 5y agoI 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 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.