What does the DOS say? (Patreon)

http://www.sigcis.org/user/256

First of all, a huge thank you to everyone that read, liked, and shared my synthesizer post on Friday! Before I go full-bore on the synth, I have a few "loose ends" to tie up. =]

The original way I got my hands dirty with computers and music was with old PC/XT and AT machines running DOS. First I had a Compaq Portable with CGA, two floppy drives, and no harddisk...! It only had a PC speaker/beeper, but that was enough to mess with the PLAY command in GWBASIC, dig around and learn about a hacked version of SAM (Software Automatic Mouth) I had, and be completely wowed by the synthesis from Music Construction Set, which I would later learn used PWM to simulate multiple channels on my crappy beeper. Also, I believe I learned that the resonance frequency of my computer case was aligned to the note of G, and the entire case of the computer would rattle when it hit that note.

This is a track I started awhile ago using Trixter's Monotone to honor and remember those days. Trixter worked on all of those 8088 demos (Corruption, Domination, MPH) and Monotone is the tracker that the music for 8088 MPH is written in. It supports multiple channels on the PC speaker by doing blippy arps when you have multiple notes going at once, and loosely follows a tracker format (which I much prefer) rather than sheet music or something like BASIC's PLAY command. Here's a screenshot:

So, what does it sound like? Well, I've included a very preliminary version of the track since the one I'm working on is getting cleaned up, that should give you a pretty good idea!

Thanks for supporting me this round, eager to get you more music! =]