from Hacker News

Monkey Island PC-speaker music player

by ttsiodras on 7/27/21, 11:08 AM with 114 comments

by nyanpasu64 on 7/29/21, 1:59 PM
Oddly 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!
by rob74 on 7/29/21, 1:17 PM
BTW, 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
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...
by agys on 7/29/21, 3:57 PM
Slightly 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
Please also appreciate the retro-ansi-gfx style of his productions!
by Razengan on 7/29/21, 1:11 PM
Even 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.. ;)
by jonplackett on 7/29/21, 11:47 AM
Original Monkey Island theme is still my favourite bit of music from a game ever.
by xattt on 7/29/21, 1:17 PM
I’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?
by darkwater on 7/29/21, 12:27 PM
This 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.
by eloeffler on 7/29/21, 12:03 PM
The 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!
by godot on 7/29/21, 4:35 PM
Oh 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.
by ggambetta on 7/29/21, 12:31 PM
This 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!
by shadowgovt on 7/29/21, 2:06 PM
It 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).
by Andrew_nenakhov on 7/29/21, 2:36 PM
Of 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.
by tluyben2 on 7/29/21, 2:09 PM
Off topic somewhat: just playing through the Monkey Island enhanced versions on Steam. Still great stuff.
by code_duck on 7/29/21, 1:33 PM
It’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.
by MrBuddyCasino on 7/29/21, 11:51 AM
Building 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.
by zxcvgm on 7/30/21, 5:44 AM
I 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
Thanks for posting this! I'll refer to it when I finally get around to making it.
by ricardo81 on 7/29/21, 12:46 PM
The 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!
by codetrotter on 7/29/21, 12:13 PM
Wait, 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
Basshunter - DotA. 2008. https://youtu.be/qTsaS1Tm-Ic
by SamPatt on 7/30/21, 1:33 AM
Curse of Monkey Island (the third one, more cartoony than pixel) is one of my all time favorite games.
Hilariously fun to play.
by SamBam on 7/29/21, 2:16 PM
What 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...
by pierrebai on 7/29/21, 4:07 PM
I wonder if using RLE encoding would not have been but vastly simpler and more compact that the huffman encoding used. Just frequency + duration.
by jonplackett on 7/29/21, 12:40 PM
What is the device between the battery and the board?
by alfonsodev on 7/29/21, 12:34 PM
So great and standalone, this should be added to ATMs, vending machines and the like :) Also could be added to your house ring bell ?
by tallmansixfour on 7/29/21, 4:14 PM
Count me as simply impressed.
by easymovet on 7/30/21, 12:54 AM
Brought a tear to my eye, so nostalgic.
by gwbas1c on 7/29/21, 1:13 PM
(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!
by hereforphone on 7/29/21, 1:26 PM
I 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.