The computers of the 80’s are somewhat well known for the unique sounds they produced. While CD quality audio and digital sound samples are the order of the day now, and have been for several decades, in the early days of computers sounds, and thus, music, were produced via internal hardware that directly generated tones – basically, they carried the same types of hardware electronic synthesizer, generating the sound on command in real time, as opposed to playing a pre-recorded sample as we are familiar with now.
Anyone familiar with classic gaming of the 8 and 16 bit era will be familiar with these tones – they are the core of what’s now known as the “chiptune” genre (a name you can think of as “musical tunes made with computer chips”), and while this idea is known well enough to most people interested in old computers and gaming tech, the actual details on how this all works, and how it differs from computer sounds and music as we know it today, is something that might be lost to some people.
While a computer like the Atari 400 might have some very basic sound production capabilities, some specialty systems of the 80’s contained full fledged synthesizer systems, ones usually used in music production of the era, and specialty software to allow for completely computer composed songs. Quite an amazing thing to think about when you consider how limited we tend to think the computers of old were.
Still, most systems of the era had somewhat limited sound production capabilities without expensive expansions. That is, save for the Commodore 64 and the legendary SID chip. The SID was found, by the nature of its design, to be an incredible synthesizer chip, far more capable what even the creator of the chip had designed it to be and as a result it’s a sound creation device that’s in demand to this very day, over 35 years since it was introduced on the Commodore 64 computer.
Oh, and no, this episode doesn’t even begin to touch on the actual capabilities of the SID chip. No one in those first few years even had a clue just how much the SID chip could do.
As always, enjoy!