System Beeps, by shiru8bit

System Beeps

by shiru8bit

supported by

Super Super Sounds Classic example of less is more, and a masterclass in chiptune composition. Favorite track: Too Many Bits.

Alessio Cosenza My 8088 is on fire now!

drmanhattan I really liked it, Dude!

MatthewVecchio Marvellous. Great compositions and varied styles / ideas on display.

A great lesson on how to do single channel PC Speaker music

All hi-energy bangers! Favorite track: Floppy Flips.

galouk People call me a crazy nerd while listening System Beeps.
I don't care, I just turn the sound up and headbang more.
Thank you Shiru8bit Favorite track: TX/RX.

	/

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Full Digital Discography

7

releases

Get all 7 shiru8bit releases available on Bandcamp and save 50%.

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Ear Shaver, Shiru's 1-Bit Music Compilation Vol.2, Faulty Robots, Best of the Meh, System Beeps, Player Alone, and Shiru's 1-Bit Music 2010 Compilation. , and , .

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1.	System Beeps 02:21	info	buy track
2.	Too Many Bits 01:49	info	buy track
3.	Battery Low 02:35	info	buy track
4.	Monoculear 02:11	info	buy track
5.	Head Step 02:36	info	buy track
6.	Bad Sector 01:44	info	buy track
7.	Dial-Down 02:34	info	buy track
8.	Handshake 01:56	info	buy track
9.	Floppy Flips 01:43	info	buy track
10.	Pixel Rain 01:50	info	buy track
11.	Single-Sided Drive 02:10	info	buy track
12.	Twinkle LED 02:08	info	buy track
13.	Clocking Ticks 01:57	info	buy track
14.	TX/RX 03:27	info	buy track
15.	Serverside 01:55	info	buy track
16.	Staff Roll 02:30	info	buy track
17.	Astro Force 01:29	info	buy track
18.	Run Under Fire 01:44	info	buy track
19.	My Mission 01:21	info	buy track
20.	Square Wave 02:09	info	buy track
21.	Final Stretch 01:47	info	buy track
22.	Coming Year 02:10	info	buy track
23.	AONDEMO Soundtrack 02:00	info	buy track

about

Introduced with IBM PC model 5150 in 1981, designed to produce very basic system beeps, the humble PC Speaker never really had a chance to shine bright as a music device. Overshadowed by much more advanced sound chips of popular home game systems, quickly replaced with powerful sound cards, it mostly was used as a fallback option, playing severely downgraded content of better sound hardware. The best it got were a few nice tunes, and some software trickery to multichannel play software-synthesized or digitized music with heavy involvement of CPU. However, with careful composing and proper use of advanced chiptune techniques, it can do much more than one would normally expect from such a basic sound device that is only capable to play single square wave voice without volume control.

System Beeps is a music album in form of an MS-DOS program that features my original music composed for PC Speaker. You can run it on any MS-DOS compatible machine with 8088 or better, and listen to some music in the glorious monophonic square wave. All that you hear here was perfectly possible back in the day on the early XT machines.

Recorded from real hardware. No audio processing applied.

An in-depth 'making of' article: habr.com/en/post/439192/
Download MS-DOS program: shiru.untergrund.net/files/system_beeps.zip
See it running: youtu.be/tUy1MEpqbvk
Source code and Reaper project files: shiru.untergrund.net/files/system_beeps_src.zip

credits

released January 23, 2019

Composed and programmed by Shiru, July 2017 - January 2019.

license

some rights reserved

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about

shiru8bit Moscow, Russia

An electronic music enthusiast who creates low tech, chiptune, and video game related music using old computers, consumer electronics, and low end synthesizers. Developer of various music software as well.

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