Music of the BBC Microcomputer System

(acornelectron.co.uk)

24 points | by eightb 3 days ago ago

6 comments

  • ralferoo 17 hours ago

    I remember a couple of really good ones that people had at my school. There was Sweet Dreams by Eurythmics that was very good, and I also remember Toccata and Fugue. Can't remember any other titles, but I know we had at least 5 or 6 being copied around while I was at school. Our school also replaced some of the BBC Micros with RM Nimbus, which of course came with BBC Basic, and there were definitely some new ones appearing in that era too.

    • zem 14 hours ago

      I had a copy of scott joplin's "the entertainer", likewise randomly passed around. somehow it was more fun to listen to it on the computer than a tape would have been :)

  • _joel a day ago

    Helps if the videos worked. It's from 2010!

  • zem a day ago

    the bbc had an amazing command, ENVELOPE, which let you shape the amplitude envelope of a sound. you can read more about it here: https://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/keeping-us-posted/3303

    as a kid i didn't understand much about how it worked; i mostly played around with it to get "laser" sound effects, but in retrospect it was astonishingly sophisticated for an 8 bit home computer. (which described a lot of the machine's capabilities!)

    • ErroneousBosh 16 hours ago

      This is what I was talking about?

      From the BBC Micro BASIC programming manual:

        ENVELOPE 1,1,-26,-36,-45,255,255,255,127,0,0,-127,126,0
        SOUND 1,1,255,255
    • ErroneousBosh a day ago

      Reading that comment I heard That Sound from the BBC Micro manual that they used to demonstrate the ENVELOPE command, the one with the rising and falling sequences of tones. I probably haven't typed that example in since I was in primary school, probably P7.

      I'll probably have to go and find an emulator now, and try it out again.