Modders and the demo scene have always found ways to pull off the impossible. Activision was in a league of their own back then too.

@kaczan3

Жыл бұрын

Good old times when Activision was the new guy fighting the evil empire Atari :D

@stgigamovement

Жыл бұрын

I did a demoscene work that is 3 kilobytes

@DIYTAO

Жыл бұрын

@@kaczan3 Also, back then, EA was decent company that supported new and innovative games.

@pillington1338

Жыл бұрын

Back in the day when I was actually excited for Activision or EA games.

@shipwreckedonapopulatedisland

Жыл бұрын

You mean they found ways to pull off the impossible mission

To clarify, Impossible Mission and Ghostbusters used speech synthesis. This was done by a company called Electronic Speech Synthesis that specialised in digitising speech. That was a software-based approach. Other games such as Space Taxi used the "volume bug" method through location 54296. Space Taxi's programmer John F Kutcher actually created his own basic sampler hardware to record himself saying "Hey Taxi" and the pad numbers, then played the sample back at different speeds to give different pitches. Later PCM sampling methods removed the problem of the samples sounding quiet. Turning off the screen display during playback was another tactic to improve the quality.

@stevethepocket

Жыл бұрын

The company was called Electronic Speech _Systems._ And I don't know about _Ghostbusters_ but _Impossible Mission_ was definitely playing back a recording; According to a 2013 interview with designer Dennis Caswell, ESS happened to have someone working there who was able to give an appropriately Bond Villain-esque performance. Even if they _had_ used speech synthesis, the SID would still have had to be manipulated into playing back those real-time-generated samples.

@buckeyechad1

Жыл бұрын

Thank you for reminding me of Space Taxi. Loved that game!

@merman1974

Жыл бұрын

@@stevethepocket the synthesis is based on a mathematical model of how speech sounds, not a direct sample. It's closer to the early example in the video where the SID is playing a tone rather than manipulating the volume register.

@HeyBirt

Жыл бұрын

@@merman1974ESS recorded/digitized the owners voice (he had a recording studio in his basement) and then was able to identify redundant segments of the sample, keeping only one and replacing them with a reference to the one sample. This greatly reduced the size of the data and allowed games like Impossible Mission to have a lot of high-quality speech without loading new samples every time. Please see the research I did into the subject in the first link referenced in the description above.

@MarkPentler

Жыл бұрын

Why did turning off the screen help? CPU cycles?

1980's Feature: "That's a bug!" 2020's Bug: "That's a feature!"

@JohnSmith-xq1pz

Жыл бұрын

Or no it's the players who are wrong lol

@Rick_Todd

Жыл бұрын

Undocumented feature

@bozimmerman

Жыл бұрын

After the 2018 discovery, you may be more right than you know. If it was a bug, why was the technique to play 8-bit samples discovered in the exact same volume register?

I used to love making SID music tracks, taking sheet music and converting them to SID files, adding lyrics and rudimentary ASCII art in the subtitle files.... About a decade ago I stumbled upon a website archive of a bunch of those old files, and I found some of my own creations in them that I had uploaded to local BBSes back in the day. That was a bit of a trip.

@stephenrobertson6025

Жыл бұрын

I used to be a C64 artist and I lost most of my artwork files over the years. I found that almost all of it had been uploaded to the internet and got it back. Incredible that those files have been preserved by uploading first to Compunet and other BBS in the 80s and then discovered on various floppy collections to be uploaded to the net.

@HProtagVtuber

11 ай бұрын

​@@stephenrobertson6025link?

@HProtagVtuber

11 ай бұрын

Link?

@sharg0

11 ай бұрын

@@HProtagVtuber ​ Sounds like "High Voltage SID Collection" (hvsc in germany), no links since it just will be deleted by youtube. RKO (remix kwed with an organisational domain) is an excellent source for remixes of sid tunes or Slayradio for a stream with a live show on Thursdays usually ( www.youtube.com/@slayradio )

Impossible Mission and Ghostbusters were also mine, and I'm sure many others first experience of speech synthesis on the 64. Great explanation of the volume bug in the 6581

I played c64 Ghostbusters sooo much. That computer was my gateway to finding guitar.

@DuckAlertBeats

Жыл бұрын

It was under your computer?

@DoubleDguitar

Жыл бұрын

@@DuckAlertBeats lol amazing, right?!

@DuckAlertBeats

Жыл бұрын

@@DoubleDguitar Yeah glad you found it!

BTW, the designer of the SID chip, Robert "Bob" Yannes, originally wanted to have 32 voices(!) but ran out of silicon space and time. Can you imagine? Bob went on to build the Ensoniq synthesizer and the company that makes it.

@mnxnm

Жыл бұрын

Yes. And it's also a shame that newer versions of SID aren't actually out anymore. 8580 had only cosmetic changes in filters and mixed waveforms, and they also messed up 4-bit sample effect known at 6581. For example, they could have put quite a new version with at least five full-stereo channels in the C64C or C128. That could really play awesome :-)

@JustWasted3HoursHere

Жыл бұрын

@@mnxnm Indeed it is a puzzle why Commodore has never upgraded any of their sound chips. Not the SID and not the Amiga's Paula chip during the lifetime of either machine line. A bit of a head scratcher as to why that is. They could have added voices, resolution (in the case of Paula), frequency, effects, etc. But for some reason they just rested on their laurels and the competition eventually caught up and (in some cases) surpassed them.

@mnxnm

11 ай бұрын

@@JustWasted3HoursHere Yes, it's really sad that the Amiga 4000 still used the sound system from the original Lorraine from 1983. I have the impression that the planned AAA chipset was supposed to have 8 16-bit stereo channels, but developers couldn't make it work properly even with backwards compatibility in mind, so the A1200 and A4000 models only have AGA, where Paula remained unchanged. The problem was clearly with the company management - they really needed a second Tramiel to drive the whip :))) Also, it's an incredible shame that the C65 remained only in the prototype stage (now auctioned on ebay for millions of dollars). The only audio upgrade there was that instead of one sid there were two, and they called it Monster-SID. Stereo was modeled after the Amiga (one sid on the left, one on the right). Still, it would have been the best 8-bit ever, and even if it didn't sell as many as the C64, I'm sure it could have produced a number of beautiful games with bombastic 6-channel music, often accompanied by digital samples.

@JustWasted3HoursHere

11 ай бұрын

@@mnxnm Indeed, according to wikipedia, the next gen sound system with Hombre (the next graphics architecture that was going to be released after AGA) would have 16-bit resolution sound processor with twelve voices(!). Here's the full feature list from wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset

@nickolasgaspar9660

11 ай бұрын

He run head first on Commodore's budget road blocks....

Many decades ago, my family took me to a restaurant on an island which was far from the town. Food was great and had arcades. I couldn't forget the game I played there that also had samples. Many years ago, I rediscovered it with MAME. It was Berzerk!!!

"The quality from the C64 is high enough quality to be hit with a Content ID claim". It's high praise indeed.

@indask8

Жыл бұрын

RIAA : SID chip scary

@huberthans4312

Жыл бұрын

48KHz 8 Bit is possible

The Commodore 64 was my first ever computer, then came the Amiga 500. These 2 computers made me the person I am today.

@TheWeepingCorpse

Жыл бұрын

A ladyboy?

@Saver310

Жыл бұрын

An retro gamer?

@Layby2k

Жыл бұрын

A nerd!

@endwigast5212

Жыл бұрын

@@TheWeepingCorpse Only in your sick, twisted fantasies.

@Saver310

Жыл бұрын

@@Layby2k cool

You forgot to mention speech synthesizers, which also appeared on the C64. In Poland we had such on the pirated BlackBox cartridge, where the Commodore was able to translate text into Polish speech in real time. It was super impressive at the time.

@donovanchilton5817

Жыл бұрын

That’s insane for the time.

@ModernVintageGamer

Жыл бұрын

yup, and thats probably a dedicated video im going to do ! the difference is that they had additional hardware to make it work

@gregor_89

Жыл бұрын

@@ModernVintageGamer it was working on the stock C64. No additional hardware required. :) It would be cool to make a video about it!

@inzyster

Жыл бұрын

It could sing too :]

@slaur42

Жыл бұрын

S.A.M. - Software Automatic Mouth - could also do this, all in software on the C64 (and a couple other computers of the time). In 1982. There's now even a Javascript version of the software online, that can run in the browser and "speak". Unmistakable, sounds identical to the way it sounded on the 64 way back then.

This must be one of the best 8-bit computers ever made, the sound and graphics for the time was awesome. it's incredible that companies like Psytronik still release games to this day, like Outrage, Steel Ranger and Hessian just to mention a few.

The C64 was an amazing machine & that turbo outrun intro music was just one of many awesome soundtracks that many games had.

The Pokey chip used in Atari 8-bit computers was actually designed to play 4-bit sound samples, a feature rarely used though probably due to memory limitations and cpu time.

@milan8063

Жыл бұрын

Yes, there was a small demo that played one sentence of a song - don't remember the name. It was synchronized with vertical retrace (15KHz).. was pretty nice.

@milan8063

Жыл бұрын

It was few seconds of the song Self Control by Laura Branigan. kzread.info/dash/bejne/hIRkwZqDZ9jemNY.html Demo: kzread.info/dash/bejne/fp9mxrttd5mYXcY.html

I really do love me some SID music, and the C64 Demo scene, as it's amazing what these guys do with the hardware that's still in 2023 being pushed beyond limits people thought not possible. Some of my favorite Demos off the top of my head are Boogie Factor by Fairlight We Are Demo by Noice, Offence, & Fairlight Desert Dream by Chorus & Resource Soild Legacy by Resouce Edge of Disgrace by Booze Design I could keep going on, and on listing off some amazing works, but that should get you started, if you have never watched any C64 Demos. Have fun going down the rabbit hole!!!

never ceases to amaze me what old hardware can do, I love to hear about the how’s and why’s

This is so cool. I never knew that it was effectively a bug in the hardware that allowed this to happen. I really feel like I missed a lot of neat stuff never owning a C64 back when I was younger. My first machine was a 386 and while that did actually give me some decent options, I remember being jealous of the sid chip.

Please do more retrospectives on old systems (: these technical details are fascinating

I remember a time when I thought that the graphics in Way Of The Exploding Fist was basically arcade quality! Me and my friends played it (and Winter Games) until my friends C64 overheated and we had to take a break to let the poor 64 cool off and then 30 mins later, load the games (slowly from tape) again! What really blew me away with the C64 though was the sound. Until this day I can enjoy listening to old classics like Parallax, Flimbos Quest and Comic Bakery. Cool little trip down memory lane!

Fun fact: Martin Galway is actually not using drum samples in the Arkanoid introtune, but game data! ;-) He was basically given the finished game, code, leveldata etc and told to "search" for parts of it that sounded cool as a sample! 8)

@carlopepi

Жыл бұрын

Actually he ripped off digidrums martin has admitted this

I had a friend back in the day that was a music composer, but with a massive love for chiptunes and the old video game soundtracks. He even worked on a documentary about video game music. He mentioned to me that the Commodore composers were really good because they had learned all these tricks to get the most sound out of the C64. And so when they went over to the later Amiga and its more powerful hardware, they applied all these tricks to get the amazing sounds out of the system many people love to this day. Thank you for making a video that explains some of these tricks that these guys used back in the day.

Love seeing videos about the c64!! Thanks for being awesome MVG

Always the tech information I enjoy watching. Thanks for the video MVG

Very interesting! Fantastic video as always bud 👍

The main disadvantage of the master volume method is that it screwed up anything else you had playing on the SID voices. The other better method which wasn't covered I believe was to use the pulse waveform at a high frequency then vary the pulse-width register to control the duty cycle for PWM audio. Then use the low-pass filter on the voice to cut down the unwanted carrier noise.

@Roxor128

11 ай бұрын

Sounds like a couple of parallels to the PC Speaker tricks for sample playback! With the PC Speaker, you can set the timer chip to output a constant voltage, then toggle the speaker-enable gate on and off for one method, which sounds terrible but is loud. The other involves using the timer's single-shot mode with varying countdowns to implement PWM, which sounds pretty good, but is also pretty quiet. If you want to hear the difference for yourself, grab a copy of Fast Tracker 2 and flip between them while playing a module.

@laurent64

11 ай бұрын

There is another and even better method that doesn't require the low pass filter : at a chosen sampling rate (usually 7819 Hz / every 2 scanlines so you are not bothered by badlines) use the first half "ramp-up" side of the triangle waveform at a controlled frequency to reach a certain value and generate one sample. Playing with the voice "test bit" the SID will not output the triangle waveform but will hold the sample value at the moment the test bit is set. Also when test bit is set the oscillator phase value is reset to 0. So you do have control ! Therefore if at 7819 Hz you reset then set the test bit and output a new 8bits high frequency value (from your sample data table), you can play samples at ~7-8bits resolution (even though the DAC is technically 12bits). The reason why triangle is used and not sawtooth is simply because the sawtooth is "twice as slow" as the triangle in ramp-up phase, and it would not be able to reach full DAC volume.

@bitset3741

7 ай бұрын

@@laurent64 IIRC this was a great way to run digis because your filters still work perfectly and you can largely filter out your carrier for a cleaner sample as well as do other effects.

I always remember taking a C64 game around to a friends house and saying "check out the speech" and you could barely hear anything. He had a C64C and I later found out that its SID (the 8580) was "fixed" and hence no digital sounds.

You can make a mod called digifix on the 8580 that basically reintroduces the click. It's involves soldering a resistor onto the board and is very easy to do. The music in Skate or Die is a good test case for it. It features some drums, which are totally silent on an unmoded 8580/board.

MVG doing anything C64 is totally my cup of coffee

I like how you show a picture of the later SID chip, complete with '8580' markings, and proceed to call it '8520' _twice_ as well as in the text overlay graphics. 🤪

This was a good episode. And a nice explanation of how the bug works. Also nice to see Mahoney's demo show up there. Looking forward to the gameboy explaination. Maybe also do nes? :-)

I knew nothing about this and it was very cool to watch. Thanks for the great content as always!

Awesome video. Blown away to discover that the speech was actually creators capitilising on a bug.

This video blew my mind. Thanks for going so in depth to explain the C64 SID bug!

This is amazing. I had those games in the 80s and I never understood how it was possible or why I couldn’t replicate it

Super nerdy and very enjoyable. Thanks so much for this!

I remember playing Beach Head with my brother and laughing when you would shoot one of your own soldiers and he'd shout, "Hey, don't shoot me!" But I also remember later in the C=64's life getting a microphone and programs that would actually let you record and playback short sound clips, and a program that would attempt to determine what note you were singing/whistling into the microphone -- I put the mic on the speaker of my electronic piano keyboard, and it was pretty consistent at telling what note I was playing, even if its guess was almost always a half-step wrong (e.g. it would display C# when I played a C).

This was a great explainer! On the Apple II there was a game called the Halley Project that had an amazing digitized audio intro. It was so clear and crisp it blew me away back in 85/86 .

@UnCoolDad

11 ай бұрын

Plasmania had a digital into too.

Anytime you talk about C64, it warms my nostalgic 💓. Thank you. So many great memories of the games, pirating, phone phreaking, and The Alliance and EaglesSoft here in the states. I was a teen, so statute of limitations has run out lol

Thoroughly interesting! Thanks for covering such a unique subject!

V8 - Return to the base immediately! Thank you for this great video. It brought back so many childhood memories. Best regards : )

I remember being blown away by a "Pump up the Jam" digitization on the C64. Ghostbusters and Impossible mission were great examples that you included. Keep doing the great work you do, MVG

All I kept thinking about at the beginning of this video was “Impossible Mission” and they’re “Stay awhile….staaaay FOREVER!” It sounds so cheesy now adays but this was the equivalent of magic to us back then. So glad you included this game in your video!

This stuff continues to amaze me, how much fun is that!

Awesome work! Thanks MVG!

This is fascinating. Honestly this type of video is why I come to this channel

Hi MGV Carrion of Censor Design here. Great episode as always! And it's great to see one of my demos on your channel ;) Samples are really cool on C64. The biggest demoscene party X in Netherlands is in a month from now and who knows what new cool demos it will bring. Cheers!

Excellent work- Thank you❤

another great video as always, you really know your stuff when it comes to things like this

"V8, return to base immediately" is a digitised speech core memory for me even before "Ghostbusters! Ah ha ha ha ha" Excellent episode!

This is something i dont think anyone else has done before. Thank you so much sir !

Many years ago I interfaced an A to D chip to the user port and was able to sample sounds and then play them back with the volume trick. Wrote the program in assembly and counted instruction cycles to make the sample speed and playback speed match. It was crude but worked

I remember being so envious and impressed, going round my friend's house and hearing the speech on Mission Impossible and Ghostbusters on his C64. It really was so incredible to hear actual voice at the time like that! Going back home to play the same games on my humble Spectrum 48K was a bit of a downer but still fun! Good days!

This is soooo awesome!

Your timing is insane with this video, I quite literally just finished Ahoy's excellent mini documentary about this. 👍🏻😎

Great Video As Always Man

That took me back! Cheers, man!

I have no idea why I watch all types of videos you do like this when I have zero idea what is going on. But I do find it very interesting even if I will never do this or know what you are doing. Very informative video as usual, MVG.

As always, excellent content with great explain and showcase

OK I understand what's happening here. I know you can't say anything because you're under NDA, but clearly you're working on a port of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom for the C64. Your secret is safe with us.

Seeing this makes me even respect more what Matt Gray has created back then with the Last Ninja 2 soundtrack. Still love the Central Park track, simply outstanding.

@fuckutube65

Жыл бұрын

...although it should be pointed out that none of these Galway tunes use samples! ;-)

Awesome video man! It seems that the voice sample is been vocoded by the sid chip using the audio as the carrier to the amp envelope. I'd imagine that the filters will also be tweakable in the basic programmer creating different tones and types of voice. Modulation parameters in the code would also make some more realistic sounding voices. I especially enjoyed using the speech window tool on the amiga workbench as this is essentially bending, shaping and expressing a synthesizer to create voices.

Geez! This takes me back! Remember before sound cards in PC's? Same solution was used.

Greay video mate ! Thanks so much

Back in the 90s, I had an IBM 286 with only a bleeper as audio output and I remember there were a couple of games playing voice samples with kinda similar quality. Good old times! Great video!

Love these videos! Thanks!

Shit. It has been 35 years since I was coding and I remembered exactly how to target $D418 to play samples and how to use it as a starting point to find music playing routines, music data and rip music from games.... Also it was possible to solder a potentiometer to ground on the later revisions of the SID chip to bring back the loudness of digitised samples (can't remember anymore which pin needed soldering though). Gee I feel old now.. 😢

Great video! I liked how you used basic to help show what was going on, all the while wondering how you were going to get it to run fast enough to reproduce any speech. I've never seen/heard the demo at 12:43 - that's pretty cool.

Perfect level for me. Just technical enough but nothing over my head. Nice job.

I always wondered how they digitized audio to play on the C64... and now I know, a manipulated 'bug' in the SID chip, nice. It still amazes me that the C64 scene is still very active ~40 years later (and I still have my C64 from the 80's). Greets to all the past, and present C64 sceners and scene groups. :) Demo Sceners and Demo Parties FTW.

The Journey arcade cabinet really did have a tape recorder inside it. It would play a few different Journey songs, depending on the level the player was on.

Nostalgia overload! You're discussing the most exciting and creative parts of my teenage years. Back then I made an 8 bit sampler on the C64 and 6581, I forget how I downsampled to 4 bit, either dividing or discarding the extra bits, either way it worked. The C64 had a history with the elite musicians sharing the best music software among themselves, later these versions would be leaked, then the rest of us got a free upgrade. Of course they always had better software again.

Great video! I always enjoy hearing music or demos from 8 bit systems like the Atari 800XL, C64 and Plus/4. Some of the demos that people can do on the Plus/4 with its bigger colour palette compared to the C64 is almost Amiga quality. I like sitting the 800XL and C64 next to one another and see how each handles a particular game's intro music, like M.U.L.E.

This was incredible! I didn’t realize so much had do be done to generate audio back in the day. That’s crazy to think about how much coding had to be done back then. And now… we have unreal engine 5 that calculates light shading on the fly. Love this C64 content! ❤

Soo Great Episode :D Love the retro music :D

Many eons ago, I found an address on my TI-99/4a that would allow for a 1-bit click. Combined with the address for the cassette audio input, I was able to record and play back several seconds of digital audio. One bit, probably around 4kHz, but still... No, it didn't sound as good as the C-64 but it was something. Other programs could play back digitally-recorded audio using the Speech Synthesizer. I never figured out how to do that, but the demos I heard were even better than what the C-64 could do.

i've been trynig to make music my entire life... but i've tried to do music for c64 only few years back ( goat-tracker ) and realizing what the end-result of an extremely limited era is nothing short of spectacular magic. Given there are 3 channels , the modern kid would get to kick,bass, snare and that would be game over

That was great & not a topic I'd ever even considered having any interest in. Thanks, MVG! =D

Well done! Great video!

this video is awesome thank you!

I remember running SAM (Software Automatic Mouth) on the Atari 800. It was quite amazing, in 1982. The Atari's sound hardware was more limited than the C64's (square waves only for synth sound), but it did have one extra channel (4), and most importantly, a PCM channel.

@Mrshoujo

Жыл бұрын

5 sound channels. 4 in Pokey, 1 in GTIA. And the Pokey can go into 2 channel 16 bit mode. And it can emulate the sound of the SID.

@SyntheToonz

Жыл бұрын

All four channels could be put into volume control mode for PCM.

The Vicious Sid Demos are amazing! They make the C64 sound like a mod playing Amiga,

@TRX303

7 ай бұрын

in fact in that same demos actual amiga mod files are played from the the stock c64, I think at 8 bits / 11kHz in that case. even higher qualities have been achieved since.

:O I'm glad that youtube suggested to me your video. For a very long time I've been thinking that c64 had 3 regular audio channels (sine, square and triangle) and the 4th one for the digital samples. I can't believe how wrong I was ... Well, after 30 or so years I've finally learned something new. Imagine how good those samples would sound if the volume was 8 bit? I still remember how sad I was when I've switched from Amiga to PC with the pc-speaker. 2 bit sound was ... horrible.

This was impressive beck then and still is now! As always I appreciate the content

MVG, I have no idea what’s happening here, but I always find your videos fascinating and very engaging. Awesome work!

23 yo and wasnt able to get into gaming until recently when life got better. Love your content dude, especially the console hack stuff

This was really great of how it was, even if could be possible.

I had both those games as a kid and had both those games! Allegedly the amount of processing power it took to send so many commands to the SID chip was the reason why games "froze" whilst the audio sample played? The c64 Ghostbusters theme on its own was such a JAM for an early title. The tricks and "hacks" that composers came up with over the c64's life were incredible and have majorly fond memories of the Commando theme and the hugely improved Ghostbusters II theme. The SID chip was and still is an amazing piece of tech

The 8-Bit Guy mentioned that not even Commodore realized in the beginning how advanced the SID chip was. Truly impressed with the ammount of knowledge in this video C=

First digitised audio I ever heard on a home computer was in the ZX Spectrum game 'Punchy'. Hearing 'That's the way to do it' coming out of the speccys in built mono speaker was like magic at the time!

Very interesting! Something that blew my mind as a kid was a driver i found that let you play audio from the PC speaker (the beep and bloop speaker). I didn't have a sound card, and i never knew this was possible on that hardware. It used all the processing power of my 486DX2 50, but it was amazing to hear a smwav file on that machine for the first time.

Great video. A perfect example of "things I didn't know that I wanted to know"

I love John's Arcade youtube channel! Wish he'd come back as he's only made like one video in the past couple of years.

Yes please, do make more videos on the digi samples on other machines!

Reminds me of AVGN's "B17 Bomber" game from Mattel. You had to plug in a separate synth module. I also recall Gauntlet and the NES port of Ghostbusters featured crude speech as well. Mindblowing for the era.

Love this type of deep dive. X

Earlier digitized sound - TumbleBugs on the Atari was one of the earliest on home systems (1982) - though the early games tended to just have 1 or 2 short phrases often at poor quality. The compression technique used for Impossible Mission and Ghostbusters was a proprietary secret and so good that it's hard to find technical information on it even today.

Shows the true genius of programmers of things like Ghostbusters on the ZX Spectrum with no sound hardware.

Very interesting video. I've coded my own C64 emulator and implemented (bad) audio emulation for it. I learned a lot about audio while doing that, but I need to learn much more!

Both Ghostbusters and Impossible Mission are imprinted in my memory, stay awhile, stay forever.

@abadenoughdude300

Жыл бұрын

Destroy him, my robots.

The ending is very impressive, I could have never dreamed of a 1Mhz computer with no external sound equipment being able to do that.