http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/a ... track.aspx
Quote:
The imagination of people on the internet continues to astound me.
Todays example: Someone took mspaint.exe and turned it into a PCM .WAV file and then played it.
Or did Microsoft include techno in the wav file as a big fat fscking easter egg, the same way it included a rudimentary flight simulator in some version of Excel? Or, as I suspect, am I just hearing the bitmaps for the icons?
You can get similar effects by playing an NES game through
my DPCM ripper.
Sounds like programmers these days don't know what Compression is, and think it's A-okay to release software that takes up 20MB of disk space.
Dwedit wrote:
Sounds like programmers these days don't know what Compression is
That or the Windows operating system requires icons to be uncompressed in much the same way that CHR ROM on an NES game is uncompressed.
EDIT: "Posted at 3:03 PM" as in Roland TB-303?
I actually made a whole bunch of experimental noise electronic songs back in 2005/6 just by opening non-music files in a music program called Goldwave. They all made screechy synthy electronic sounds.
Reminds me of this remix of A Boy and His Blob.
http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR00881/
Quote:
As it says on my page -
http://listen.to/mazedude - The reason I did this was quite a joke - this game and its music both have graced several "most annoying game" and "worst music" polls in the OCR Messageboards. So - someone had to remix it!
Might as well be Mazedude. Also, I dunno if you've ever messed with shoving EXE, TXT, FNT and whatever else format files into the sample bank of a tracker, but the results are quite fun sometimes. Most of the time it's garbled white noise, but now and then you can find a pitch! Ah, and then you can track with it. There are several moments in the tune where that's what you hear - ONLY non-Wav samples. Files that were never, ever meant to be samples. Garbage! Bwuhaha! Quite a fun twist of irony, eh? Most annoying game music, remixed with garbage! And to top it off, I made it Happy Industrial. Like - the techno folks have Happy Hardcore, but what about the industrial people? Heh, so yeah - all in all this was a fun and silly experiment, I don't expect a ton of folks to dig it, but it just had to be done.
My friend and I (in Dropoff 7) used to do that in Fasttracker 2, opening random files as samples. We had a good number of songs that have at least instrument that was created like that. And of course they come out totally differently if you open it as signed/unsigned, 8-bit/16-bit. Some of them did sound pretty cool. The mspaint one turned out pretty interesting.
Way back when I first got a sound card, (the awesome Pro Audio Spectrum 16!), there was this little bundled program called "Play.exe". It would play anything you threw at it as an 8-bit wave file. I had tried playing other non-wave files with it too, but I noticed that it made more interesting tone-like sounds when I played some text file that consisted of boxes drawn using the MS-DOS character set.
When I first got into Linux in 1995, we would do stuff like "cat randomfile > /dev/au" (Sun audio device semantics on a sound-blaster on a PC).
You can also use SoX to play any file as audio. To play sound of uncompressed pictures, you can pipe the output from the ImageMagick "stream" command to SoX.
The beats and instrument-like sounds in MSPaint might be things like cosine tables, palette selector colour spectra, things like that. Just a guess.
If you like crap like this, you might like
The Gerogerigegege (NSFW). Better
read some interviews (NSFW) first though.
ROCK AND ROLL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
P.S. -- The best part about the PAS16 was how you had to load SB emulation software to get most applications to work with it, since only demos and some other random stuff supported the card natively. The other best part about the PAS16 was how whenever I'd bring up this fact, advocates of the card would always resort to the same rebuttal point, which was "yeah so? it could do 16-bit 44kHz recording, and it sounded clean without any noise!" Yep, as you can see, we're all using PAS16s today. You'll find me making the same arguments ""supporting"" cards I owned myself (GUS, GUS Max) too, so don't think I'm just pickin' on ya, Dwedit. :-)
I felt so cheated when I had my first Ensoniq AudioPCI sound card. For those of you not familiar with this card, it doesn't support any OPL/Adlib sound at all. Instead, it makes guesses to which wavetable MIDI instruments are close to the desired instrument. And it usually guesses very very poorly.
I ended up getting a Sound Blaster AWE64 to replace it, and it was awesome. This thing could add Chorus and Reverb effects to Adlib sound even in pure DOS mode. Game music just came alive, sounding almost as good as Wavetable MIDI, but it's still the authentic Adlib sound.
I've never seen DosBox try to replicate anything like that.
Come on guys, the PC speaker was the best thing ever for DOS games!
My 386 didn't have a sound card, and one day a friend of mine gave me a floppy with some audio driver for windows 3.1 that allowed us to play WAV files through the PC speaker... it was the greatest thing ever, even though the whole computer stopped (even the mouse cursor) while sound was playing.
Seconding the PC Speaker thing, that was awesome. My copy came in a book titled "Windows Sound Funpack".
But to take things to an extreme, Pinball Fantasies was later released, and it played 4-channel mod files through the PC speaker. Never had it back in the day though.
I've also tested out some programs that will play MP3 files through the PC speaker.
Sorry, gotta disagree about the PC speaker. You can call me spoiled -- stock audio on my IIGS sounded way better than PC speaker :P. I was pretty impressed by first-generation MOD players for the PC which had support for the PC speaker though; made me think back to the Apple II+. Aww isn't that cute, nostalgia atop nostalgia.
Fasttracker 2 also supported PC speaker sound. It sounded pretty good to me, clean but extremely quiet. There may have been another mode that made it sound louder, but distorted. I was forced to use it when my SBPro 2.0 failed (volume pot went out, I didn't know how to fix stuff like that back then). I replaced it with an SB16, my PC had 4 PCI and 1 ISA slot, and in my wisdom I figured I better put that ISA bus to use. No surprise that I had to buy yet another soundcard as soon as I built my next PC..
I do sorta remember there being a PC speaker sound driver for win3.11
koitsu wrote:
Sorry, gotta disagree about the PC speaker. You can call me spoiled -- stock audio on my IIGS sounded way better than PC speaker
.
That's because the GS had the Ensoniq DOC, which supported at least 15 voices.
And yes, I remember using a PC with only the PC speaker and having to use the driver you're talking about.
koitsu: Oh, come on, you come up with better sound using just an 8254 ;)
For reasons I really don't understand, they finally decided to add PCM-over-beeper support to the linux kernel (snd-pcsp.ko) in 2.6.26 in mid-2008. Which sounds to me like the right time to have removed support for it, but fine, whatever.
Hey hey hey, I said it reminded me of an old Apple II+..... :D
This reminds me of the time I opened the arcade version of
TMNT in Goldwave.
Just about any GBA game will sound like that, as will any mod/s3m/xm/it file.