Monkey Island PC-speaker music player (opens in new tab)

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.

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

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?

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

You've got a good ear!

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Assassin's Creed Black Flag is a bit like that, but not at all like MI.

Wind Waker (Zelda for the Game Cube) is like that.

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.

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

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

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 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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Or Klisje para klisje

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...

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.

Most 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

PC games had great music by the late 80s, it just wasn't cheap. Sierra On-Line is notable for supporting the Roland MT-32, starting with King's Quest IV in 1988.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_MT-32

By 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.

Ah, clever, like this? https://www.ebay.com/itm/372798620272 ($6)

So then how do you attach/enclose this tiny speaker?

:-)

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

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

Isn't that in Monkey Island 2?

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

> 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.

The 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.

A 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.

I had it as a ringtone for a while (not the PC speaker version mind you)...

I 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.

Mostly, 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 :-)

It'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.

It was definitely a joke and it was in line with the humor of the game. The game broke the fourth wall all the time. One of the characters told you to buy the game Loom. The troll on the bridge was George Lucas with a troll mask on. They had a ton of anachronistic elements like soda vending machines in the age of piracy. At the end of the game Guybrush reveals that he learned to never pay more than 20 bucks for a video game.

You f̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ talk like a dairy Farmer! ™

You are the Only One™.