Armed with nothing more than his rusty but trusty Timex Sinclair 2048 (A Sinclair ZX Spectrum clone) and it’s 1-bit, single channel buzzer, Mister Beep makes some astounding chiptune music.
Actually the TS2048’s might 3.5Mhz Z80 processor lets you do some pretty funky tricks to simulate up to 8 (count ‘em!) channels of sound. It’s still in mono though, and it still sounds like a speed-driven maniac on a kazoo.
My favourites have to be Evil Laugh (with a 1-bit sample at the start and some great drums), CPU’s Explosion (with 8 channel sound, something I didn’t expect to see on a speccy clone!), Play Beeper Play (and Part II) and the cover of the Hang On theme (at least I think it is, it was a long time ago..)
Check out how this guy does it and get some more tunes here
This reminds me of my 1-bit sampling experiments long ago with my Schneider CPC 664 (called Armstrad in the UK). It was a lot of fun and I did so much more in Z80-assembler then than today
. Sadly I don’t own this computer anymore.
It’s funny you mention the Amstrad/Schneider CPC. We did a round up of 8-bit GUI driven OSes as well as a post on a Unique CPC OS called FutureOS a while back.