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Avatar by @DrDubz.
Banner by one of Colin Jackson, Rick Lodge, Steve Noake, or David Severn from Bubsy in: Fractured Furry Tales for the Atari Jaguar.


mcc
@mcc
  1. "Empty" (YMF288 Cover), jaezu (original by 4-mat)

Yamaha FM was the sound of pop in the 80s, with the DX7 used in more hits than I can name, and then the sound of high-end computers in the 90s, with budget versions of the DX7's chip showing up in the Genesis, Neo Geo, Soundblaster etc.

This is a chiptune cover of another chiptune. Originally a 512-byte demo for the C64 SID chip, here remade for the Yamaha chip of the Sharp PC-98 as laid-back, vaporwavey electric-piano funk.

  1. "TD-3 // RD-6 + volca FM = f u n k", Ricardo Schnidrig

Here cheap Behringer reproductions of the Roland 303 and 606, both running at maybe half the tempo those machines are usually run at, combine with an entire garage workbench worth of guitar pedals to make some unbelievably laid back acid atop a foamy wall of phased FM. Cool and dreamy and a little bit hypnotic.

  1. "Scarlet Skies", CorvusScribe

This is a chiptune piece on the 4-channel POKEY chip that handled sound and random number generation on the Atari 400 and 800 computers, plus most of Atari's 80s arcade games (Missile Command, Centipede etc).

This one's all big crashing chords, epic and dramatic. Sometimes you just want to listen to some PWMed square waves. The visualization in the video looks pretty cool.

  1. "Oh Sheila", Ready for the World

This is from that period in the 80s I've talked about before, when hip hop, new tech and Prince were causing pop music to change quicker than musicians could keep up with. It's a beautifully rocking R&B track, with borderline-experimental staccato everything. Morse code synths.

The link above goes to the full 4-minute version of the song, but if you want to see an incredible moment in men's fashion, look up the music video, or just GIS for "Ready for the World band"

  1. "Beyond your mind", Reinos

This is a eurodance DOS tracker tune from 2004, with sampled (?) acid synth noises and some fun stuttery violin sounds. Take this into a club in mid-1996 and it would have been the hypest thing.

This was posted on YouTube by the artist, and as the artist does not link the .xm file, and the website advertised in the .xm file on screen appears to be dead, this is probably the only copy of this track on the Internet.

⬇️ Click below for the sound of an overclocked NES ⬇️


  1. "zxy", Kiyomi Tadagumi

A 60-second chiptune onslaught made by virtually overclocking the NES's 2A03 sound chip to unlock new powers. This is the second time I've featured overclocked NES music in this post, although last time "only" went up to 400hz, whereas this goes all the way up to 1000hz. (I think that these numbers refer to the external "master clock" that the speed of everything else on the system latches to— on a regular NES this is the 60hz NTSC signal of the television, on a PAL NES it's 50hz, here it's 1000.)

This piece is dense. Every six seconds appears to show off a new, different "impossible" synthesis technique. It's super cool, but frustrating!— it's simply incredible as flexing, but since no musical phrase repeats over the course of the track's 60 seconds none of the fragments are given a chance to do much as "music". I wish for a longer version with a "song structure"— ABABCDAB or something instead of ABCDEF.


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in reply to @mcc's post:

So a cool thing about the "master clock" thing, because you're right - it does inevitably boil down to an external clock source.

For one, you can do a loop-and-poll type mechanism of pretty much any length. Timing for video usually involves polling for "sprite 0 hit", but what if we only care about audio, and high speed audio at that? We need interrupts.

On the NES/Famicom, there are two major sources of interrupts, NMI's, and IRQ's.

The NMI is from the video circuit, the PPU, and if the correct bit is set in the control register, it is synchronized to fire an NMI right at the end of a frame, to signal software to immediately and unconditionally enter vblank routines. NMIs are of the highest priority; they can interrupt an IRQ, and they can mask the firing of other IRQs (setting the interrupt flag to 0 when fired); but they cannot themselves be masked by SEI/CLI, or interrupted. (They can be disabled with a PPU register setting.)
These cannot fire at a speed faster than 60hz, though, but clever timing and cycle counting can be used with the NMI rate as a least-common-divisor.

An IRQ, on the other hand, is done through an external circuit, and functions as an open-collector bus line, which effectively ORs together all IRQ sources on its IRQ bus; these are the APU itself (in two ways!), and an IRQ line on the cartridge slot.

The cart slot function is rather self-explanatory. You can have an arbitrary timer circuit on the cartridge provide an interrupt timer reference to the game program.
Some NES mappers have interrupt serving and/or timing hardware, too - some using special sprite reads from CHR to trigger an IRQ; others using a PIT-like circuit, not unlike that in the IBM PC.

The APU, in the first method, can signal an interrupt when a frame timer is satisfied (at 60/50hz, like the PPU). This is intended mainly for "normal" music engine routines in a game, so that precious video interrupts aren't wasted loading/processing audio data.

The second APU IRQ method, is when a DMC/DPCM sample (the 'wave' channel) finishes playing.
The latter gives us an interesting opportunity for fast interrupt timing; you can have a DMC sample of arbitrary length, and play it at any of 16 speeds.
People have used this for doing raster-based "racing the beam" scanline effects in homebrew, but it can be exploited as a high-precision timebase for the audio engine, if the DMC channel is not important.

Information largely from https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/APU_DMC and https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/IRQ