The chiptune music scene is principally rooted throughout the sounds of the distinctive Nintendo Sport Boy and the Commodore 64, whereas nonetheless welcoming a wide range of totally different {{hardware}} beneath its fundamental umbrella. Nonetheless, few chip musicians current as a lot as a gig hauling a PDP-1. That’s perhaps a shame, provided that the Fifties interval machine can produce beautiful music—as demonstrated by [Peter Samson] and [Joe Lynch].
The video demonstration was recorded on the Laptop Historic previous Museum in Mountain View, California. [Peter Samson] is working the PDP-1, which is working the Harmony Compiler—which allows the machine to play 4 explicit individual voices. That’s achieved by benefiting from the PDP-1’s program flags, which might be seen as six gentle bulbs on the administration panel. Instructions might be utilized to point out these bulbs on and off. The Harmony Compiler works by switching the bulbs on and off fast adequate to create audible sq. waves when the sunshine bulb outputs are wired to a simple audio amplifier.
Using Harmony Compiler, [Joe] and [Peter] labored collectively to transcribe the music Olson by Boards of Canada to play on the PDP-1. The music is encoded on paper tape, and fed into the machine—which dutifully performs once more the hauntingly beautiful melody.
In case you’re throughout the code that achieved this, it’s blessedly obtainable via Github. In case you like tales about earlier pc techniques having fun with music, we’ve obtained these too. Video after the break.
[Thanks to Stephen Walters for the tip!]
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