ZX Spectrum: Experimenting with 1-Bit Sound

mdp2021•23 minutes ago

I hope everybody knows Tim Follin - or will now come to know his genius.

> Agent X ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T42WuUpBuHE ) or Agent X II ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNc_xczyGLc ) or Chronos ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-D24A_N4d4 ) or Raw Recruit ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl8dAVybwq8 ) or Future Games ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orEXKOBIv_8 )... // A modern attempt, the ON and OFF album by Rich 'Tufty' Hollins ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nEfO4Yu7Mg )

(Repost originally for submission Furnace - the biggest multi-system chiptune tracker ever made https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41609254)

feintruled•about 1 hour ago

The article ends to a link to a video that shows off the technique and it blows my mind the Spectrum beeper could produce this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cOu32m3wvQ

gxd•about 1 hour ago

I created a program like that back in the day. In my case, I recorded my voice through the "MIC" input and played it back through the TV. A few seconds of sampled audio required the entire available memory. While I fully understood what was going on, I thought it was magical that the Spectrum could "speak with my voice".

louprado•29 minutes ago

More mind blowing, that entry took _second_ place! First place would probably break my brain for the day so I won't look it up.

Release party: DiHalt 2026 summer Compo: Demo Platform: zx spectrum Ranked: 2nd

codazoda•about 1 hour ago

Sounds pretty good. Reminds me of the Demo Scene and the types of music they were able to create.

geori•22 minutes ago

Reminds me of an experiment that we did with TI calculators in the late 90s. Someone found that you can put an AM radio next to the calculator and it would beep based on what instructions were run on the Z80. There were some demos that played songs via 1 bit beeps like this, but since games actually have to run instructions, you couldnt reliably play background music during gameplay.

fallat•about 1 hour ago

People may enjoy this too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6f8PURcPEE

End result of it playing 1-bit music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjTihhFG03o

bezko•about 1 hour ago

Turns out 1-Bit encoding is the most efficient solution, even for the highest end of audio quality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-sigma_modulation

alienbaby•38 minutes ago

Some apparent links don't appear to work at the start of the page, and I couldn't see any links to listen to the output?

_def•about 1 hour ago

reminds me of: https://github.com/protodomemusic/mmml

Zardoz84•20 minutes ago

It would be interesting if someone could implement or adapt Roman Black's BTC algorithm to model the Speccy beeper. https://www.romanblack.com/BTc_alg.htm

ZX Spectrum: Experimenting with 1-Bit Sound

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