Amiga/C64 Retro Radio Station

Hot Trout writes "24/7 Streaming Retro Radio bringing to you all those classic game and demo tunes from the 80's and 90's. Mainly C64 and Amiga but also games. This allows DSL users to enjoy their old school fav's in 128 kbps, 44Khz, STEREO. Very very cool ... Check it out at The old Computer @ Retro Radio." I've been reading High Score lately, so retro gaming is great to run through again.

Comments

Kohina

[staili]

Another good retro radio station is Kohina

Re:Kohina

[Mattsson]

I'm sure this is redundant as hell, but there is also Nectarine, scene music radio.

http://www.scenemusic.net/

C64 audio

[wfmcwalter]

For anyone who's still interesting in those classic C64 tunes, Chris Abbott (and some other folks, I think) has remade a bunch of C64 tunes with modern equipment - I can strongly recommend his site

Re:C64 audio

[Bostik]

Phew, thank $deity that this news item didn't appear too much sooner. Just last weekend I ordered three records from Chris's site. Lucky me, I have all the chances of actually getting what I wanted. I quite expect his stock to drop to zero after you mentioned c64audio.com in here.

The shopping cart system c64audio.com runs, uses some nasty IE-specific javascript tricks. It won't display correctly (or virtually at all) on Mozilla or Opera. Being a linux user, this was somewhat problematic. When I mailed about this, Chris was very responsive and helpful. He told me to disable javascript entirely and go directly to this page in order to see what his shop has to offer. After a little education about PGP and link-hunting, I was also able to send him my credit-card details and my order encrypted. Yes, GPG is all fine and good (I use it), but it still lacks a solid, out-of-the-box integration to w32 mail clients. As I understand it, Chris is a computer-literate person but not a techie.

Incidentally, if anyone happens to know a nice free software shopping-cart system that runs on IIS and can access and use Worldpay's brokerage system, Chris would love to know about it. I tried to find one, but it seems very few shopping cart packages actually interface with Worldpay. It would be so good to get c64audio.com usable and accessible to all users. As the situation stands at the moment, that functionality bug may cost Chris quite a many customers. Given the selection of retro spirited records there is rather impressive, it's a shame.

Anyone remember Rick Dangerous?

[Komrade S.]

The faux Indiana Jones themesong from the Amiga 500 classic still haunts me late at night...

Re:Anyone remember Rick Dangerous?

[letoram]

You do have the chance to once again experience frustration in the shape of digital "entertainment" thanks to

XRick

Now if you'd rather give your gameboy advance a severe bashing after stepping into one of those 'less-than-obvious' spike traps for the n'teenth time (if you have a flash-linker of course)

Rick Dangerous Advance

You will be able to and hopefully soon.

Re:Anyone remember Rick Dangerous?

[Komrade S.]

Rick Dangerous 2 was the ultimate frustration for me. I'm also extremely surprised that anyone else shares this sort of enthusiasm for the old game. Now, if you liked/had a ROM of Switchblade 2, you would be my new messiah.

Should I pay for a Slashdot subscription?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, really? I'm serious. Is it worth it? michael is my favorite editor. I think he is cute and he posts the most bestest stuff.

This is the worst story posted on /. EVER

[Anonymous Coward]

Good going. Moron.

Nectarine

[Anonymous Coward]

For Europeans, Nectarine is where it's at for retro Amiga/C64/PC demo scene and old game music.

Re:Nectarine

[pomac]

And the retroradio posted here is only a Nectarine relay....

Re:Nectarine

[Jugalator]

Aahh... I see. :-P
Well, all credit to the Nectarine then! :-D

Re:Nectarine

[Ziviyr]

retro MOD/S3M music

Haha, you called S3M retro!

ROFL

It's dead Jim

[Anonymous Coward]

Amiga is dead. Get over it.
Bruce Perens was fired
ESR is a drunkard
FreeBSD 5.0 is a piece of shit
TEH MANDRAEK 0WnZ j00!!!

Re:It's dead Jim

[jpop32]

> Amiga is dead. Get over it. The Amiga may be dead, but it sure was the last computer worth the emotional attachment. Which is why I have sympathy for all of you living and breathing Linux. Been there, done that. :-)

Re:It's dead Jim

[Jugalator]

Amiga isn't dead

Re:It's dead Jim

[nickos]

Take a look at the Pegasos. It's a far better design than the AmigaOne (being built by the ex-phase5 guys; bplan) and it's release really is imminent. Runs Linux too of course...

Re:It's dead Jim

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see..
Phase 5:
Let's take preorders for G3 cards for the Amiga. Then we close the shop and keep the money to minimize our losses. Some could well have disappeared into their own pockets.

Then we have the infamous DCE, who are known mainly for not sending back repaired cards untill a year later.

We have Thendic-France - who are mainly famous for running around with weird hats at parties and expos.
Along with them we have Bill Buck.. CEO of VisCorp. VisCorp ring a bell? "We own the Amiga - oops, we don't anyway, because we can't pay on time".

Besides that we have Petro - the main reason why Amiga didn't move to PPC in the mid 90's.

Put all of these people together, and you have the guys behind Pegasos and MorphOS.

I wouldn't buy ANYTHING from them. Not even bubble gum.

Re:It's dead Jim

[Anonymous Coward]

The Pegasos is technically superior (the AmigaOne is essentially a donglised POP/CHRP board), and it's actually going to happen.

Didn't phase5 go bust because Amiga Inc told everyone that AmigaDE was the future (and that it was therefore pointless to buy Amiga hardware)?

I don't understand at all what you have against Petro or Thendic.

Re:It's dead Jim

[Anonymous Coward]

Death to Pegasos! Amiga Akbar!!!

honestly, it's just a komputer!

Love the radio by the way... the memories :)

ARE YOU GHEY?

[Anonymous Coward]

UADE plays most Amiga music formats

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are interested in listening to old amiga retro songs on UNIX you can use UADE (Unix Amiga Delitracker Emulator).

http://www.ee.tut.fi/~heikki/uade.html

UADE plays approximately 150 sound formats (mod variants, future composer, hippel, brian's sound monitor,david whittaker etc..)

You can obtain songs from Exotica
http://hangar18.campus.luth.se/exotica/

Oh btw. UADE is Free / Open Source Software.

Re:UADE plays most Amiga music formats

[Anonymous Coward]

I've tried it and man does it SUCK. Sounds garbage and crashes all the time.

Re:UADE plays most Amiga music formats

[Anonymous Coward]

And the worst thing is, that you won't be able to change the fact that it sounds like garbage, even if you would use any other player.

Re:UADE plays most Amiga music formats

[Anonymous Coward]

s/fact/opinion/
I won't go into debate about Amiga music.

Re:UADE plays most Amiga music formats

[Anonymous Coward]

What a waste of bandwith.

I gave it a try. And all I got was some weird screeching sounds, which didn't resemble music in any way.

Maybe this is just a hoax that feeds random noise to /dev/dsp, or maybe it's just the crappy audio hardware it is trying to emulate.

Re:UADE plays most Amiga music formats

[Anonymous Coward]

In my experience Deliplayer http://deliplayer.com/ is waaaay better.

128kbps 44KHz stereo

[Zakabog]

Why? With a 128kbps stream, 3 seconds of audio is larger than most of the games on the C64 and amiga. There's no vocals, complicated guitar riffs, anything else that would need high bitrates, alot of beeps and different pitches, why would you need 128kbps 44KHz stereo?

Re:128kbps 44KHz stereo

[MikeDX]

Although very cool, this does seem like a waste of bandwidth (yes I'm a hypocrite listening to it right now). You can just download a c64 "sid" player here and grab a load of tunes here. You can even play these sid files in winamp using SidAmp. Enjoy

Re:128kbps 44KHz stereo

[Anonymous Coward]

Because, if it's been reproduced properly on 'real' hardware, you need some resolution to capture the vagaries of the sound. It's hard to emulate a SID *perfectly*- and they came in at least 3 revisions- which is why there's actually custom hardware out there that recycles them from the old hardware.

The Amiga was the first machine to bring sampled music to the forefront (though it had its share of algorithmic tunes); in that case, you can reproduce the sound pretty accurately, but there are still vagaries of timing (PAL vs. NTSC) and playback to take into account. A 'true' algorithmic chiptune from the Amiga is going to be a fairly complex waveform, and as such, is the sort of thing meant for compression in MP3.

Nobody's got a streaming SID or MOD protocol yet, so... this is one way to get your retro fix on, hopefully accurately.

Re:128kbps 44KHz stereo

[hrm]

If you're not emulating the C64 SID chip, you'll need a fairly high-bit (just as high as for "normal" music) mp3 stream to properly reproduce the audio.

The SID chip didn't just beep at different pitches, it was a digital/analog synthesizer on a single chip.

When BYTE magazine compiled a list of the 20 most memorable microchips ever, the SID chip was in there. At the time, it was way ahead of every other sound producing silicon found in home computers. Some considered the Commodore Amiga's fully digital synthesizer chips a step back.

Re:128kbps 44KHz stereo

[abiogenesis]

But IIRC SID had a sampling rate of only 4 kHz, am I wrong? Why should we go more than that?

Re:128kbps 44KHz stereo

[Anonymous Coward]

> But IIRC SID had a sampling rate of only 4 kHz, am I wrong? Why should we go more than that?

Because it was analog. If you used 4kHz then you had to say, at each of the 4000 points, somthing like "and here the sound-frequency is 500Hz", "and now it goes up to 510Hz" and so on. But sampling at 4kHz doesn't do that, it just takes one (1) value per sample, and that does not describe the frequency but is only one dot in the waveform. The blocky stairsteps that result from 4kHz sampling don't aproximate the analog soundsource very good, because that had perfectly smooth waves.

Re:128kbps 44KHz stereo

[Anonymous Coward]

SID was a synthesizer chip, with both digital and analog components, and thus potentially outputting continuously variable waveforms modulated by other continuously variable waveforms.

You _could_ use it to playback 4kHz samples by modulating a wave with a high-frequency square wave continuously varied by the CPU. This was enough for intelligible speech, but not music - cf. "Arabian Nights"'s "Imrahil began his quest on Sinbad's Ship" and "Myth"'s "Welcome to Myth". Myth (not the much later PC game) also had a really catchy, haunting theme tune by "Maniacs of Noise", which sounds really cool on electric violin.

However, the SID was primarily a synthesis device, where one digitally programmed registers of the chip to tell it to modulate analogue square, sine, saw, triangle and white-noise waveforms by other square, sine, saw, triangle and white-noise waveforms. The C64 had 64k of memory - that's enough for about

You can still buy, at great expense, a SID chip in a box, for use by musicians on stage.

The older SID chips are generally regarded as better, providing a much richer sound, due mainly to the greater reliance on analog circuitry on-silicon.(the VICE C64 emulator includes the reSID library, which emulates this difference perfectly - switch on the fly to the 8570 (new) SID, and hear an instant decrease in sound quality :-) )

There was also a silly hack where one could playback (very distorted) samples via the "record" line of the custom CBM tape-deck interface.

New Tunes

[turgid]

Don't worry, Roy and Elvis are not only working on a new Amiga and Amiga OS, but also a load of crazy new games and demos with some cool and groovy rock and roll tunes, daddy-o! :-)

Re:New Tunes

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, I hit submit accidentally instead of "Post Anonymously." There goes my karma! :-)

Nectarine

[Wavemaker]

This isn't the first of this kind, Nectarine has been streaming C64 and Amiga demo music for a few years now.

They even stream from different mirrors, at selectable bitrates.

Alambik Player ???

[MavEtJu]

Never heard of it, but the stream looks like a normal Shoutcast/Icecast stream and xmms likes it.

Now if they only started to play Arkanoid... :-)

Re:Alambik Player ???

[richie2000]

Now if they only started to play Arkanoid... :-)

I have it as ring signal on my cellphone. It's interesting to see who recognizes it (not many do).

Re:Alambik Player ???

[SkankhodBeeblebrox]

That almost gives me a good justification to owning a cell phone :)

I got a couple of awesome arkanoid theme remixes off of Overclocked Remix that were pretty good as well...

Seems a bit pointless (edit) actually it doesn't

[Graspee_Leemoor]

I enjoyed all those great tunes on the 8 and 16 bit micros back in the day and I can see why someone would download emulators and get the songs to play whenever they want. Hell, I'd even nearly sort of sympathise with someone who made a cd for the car.

However I don't see the point of a radio station playing these tunes.

Actually, oops, shoot me, I've figured out a valid reason while typing this: so you can hear songs you've never heard before that you didn't know you liked. In fact I suppose this is the point of all radio stations compared to buying cds (or however you acquire music).

God I'm such a dumbass. Anyway I do have a cold so that's my excuse. Woozy in da head!

graspee

Machinae Supremacy

[eddy]

Since I'm not affiliated with the group I can plug them. c64-inspired rock is my own description. They have ~130MByte of music available for download. I know that most of my friends who were into c64 music also dig these guys.

Get the vorbises, not the mp3s.

Re:Machinae Supremacy

[Bostik]

Yep, their playing and sounds really appeal to retroists :) I even made an audio CD out of the vorbises, so I would have something different to listen to while driving. Evidently, my girlfriend's little brother fell in love in the music when she was visiting her family back home - and asked if he could keep the CD. Well, I can always burn a new one. At the same time, I might have given the band some new listeners. Her brother will, undoubtedly, play that cd to his friends...

Their appearance on this year's Assembly was one of the reasons I organized myself a ticket there. Sure, when live, they play louder and much more aggressively than on those downloadable versions but it was a nice gig no matter what. Too bad their vocalist put too much force in his performance after the (second of third) encore that he snapped a string from his electric guitar. I never got to hear Anthem Apocalyptica live :(

UADE for UNIX plays over 150 Amiga Sound Formats

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are interested in listening to old amiga retro songs on UNIX you can use UADE (Unix Amiga Delitracker Emulator).

http://www.ee.tut.fi/~heikki/uade.html

UADE plays more than 150 sound formats (mod variants, future composer, hippel, brian's sound monitor,david whittaker etc..)

You can obtain songs from Exotica
http://hangar18.campus.luth.se/exotica/

Amiga! ST! (really OctaMED and Bars'n'Pipes)

[Anonymous Coward]

ST!

Amiga!

ST!

etc.

Seriously though, the Amiga was _much_ better for music than the ST - musicians often fell for the false economy of the ST with it's built in (crappy) midi port, but a midi card for the amiga always provided better much midi anyway, and Amiga Tracker packages, particularly OctaMED SoundStudio (now available for Windows*), really completely outclassed ST tracker packages. And Amiga Bars'n'Pipes is still unmatched.

What happened to Bars'n'Pipes? Microsoft bought it, and promptly stopped all development! However, they weren't totally evil: You can still get a (binary-only, no source) copy today from the previous link.

Bars'n'Pipes had a fascinating and extremely powerful UI, where one composed by plumbing components together. Some newer audio packages attempt a similar metaphor, but bar'n'pipes did it better (and in 198x too!). Please, if you're a GUI sound application author, take the time to get Bars'n'pipes up and running on an Amiga Emulator.

* And I know they have an unstable Linux build of OctaMED they're not releasing yet... (mainly because the OSS-lite sound system that's the default in Linux 2.4.x totally sucks, and they don't think the market's big enough if they require ALSA)

Re:Amiga! ST! (really OctaMED and Bars'n'Pipes)

[mccalli]

Seriously though, the Amiga was _much_ better for music than the ST - musicians often fell for the false economy of the ST with it's built in (crappy) midi port...

Er...no. For soundtracker and computer-based music, there's no argument. The Amiga destroyed the ST (and I was an ST owner).

For pro MIDI-work however, the Amiga never really got a look in. The availability of Cubase on the ST, and the high-res (for the time) mono monitor made for a superb production environment.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Amiga! ST! (really OctaMED and Bars'n'Pipes)

[cluke]

Actually, MS did eventually release the source for Bars'n'Pipes, and it has undergone many modernising improvements since.

Have a look.

Another good one..

[Anonymous Coward]

http://nectarine.ojuice.net

In fact it almost sounds like the same idea, save for that it's -slightly- more specific than Nectarine is :>

I use UADE.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.ee.tut.fi/~heikki/uade.html

uade supports lots of different amiga formats on unix variants (they claim more than 100 formats).

Re:I use UADE.

[Anonymous Coward]

Astroturfing!

MSX radio channel

[MavEtJu]

There is even an MSX radio channel.

"New" Amiga delayed again!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't hold my breath waiting for those new tunes...

Amiga songs

[Anonymous Coward]

are the goatse.cx equivalent of audio world.

For the lazy folks...

[Anonymous Coward]

The 128kbit stream was here before it was Slashdotted.

Nectarine

[Jugalator]

I'm personally a big fan of the Nectarine. Broadcasting music from the demo scene of the 80's and 90's. Timeless Amiga and C64 music such as Second Reality, Nine Fingers, Deadlock, Desert Dreams, and much more. You need this site if ever having owned an Amiga/C64, especially if you had lots of MODs that were lost when switching to PC or was into demos. Check out the Top 50 requested music yourself and let Winamp enjoy playing some excellent retro MOD/S3M music!

I hope that site never dies, and likely it won't since the material they play is either copyright free or played with the author's permission. So it's a free station playing free music.

broadcasting C64 apps

[Jantastic]

I remember recording Commedore64 programs from the radio... which was fun.

Press record on tape _now_ - and after a few minutes of noise you had a program on tape.

It even worked :)

Re:broadcasting C64 apps

[Jugalator]

I wonder what would happen if there was an active RIAA back then. Ban radio tranmissions since they're in violation of the DMCA, as they can be used to circumvent copy protection!

Re:broadcasting C64 apps

[MavEtJu]

Heh, that reminds me of Basicode.

On the dutch radio between 1980 and 1985 there was the computer/science/space program Hobbyscoop and they always had a newsletter in Basic. This was at the time that every computer was different (Z80-based, 6800-based, 8080-based etc etc), with all different kinds of Basics with all different kind of ways to do things (for example, clear the screen, on the MSX it was CLS, on the Philips P2000T is was print chr$(12)). To overcome this problem they has a set of basic-subroutines. For example if you did "gosub 100", you cleared the screen. If you did "gosub 110", you would go to position (x%,y%) on the screen etc. This way the one basic program could be ran on all home-computers at that time.

Every wednesday evening between 19:25 and 19:30 the newsletter was send and it was just like playing an data-tape on your cassettedeck. I taped it and later on with a simple three resistor circuit played it on the printerport of the P2000 and I could read my weekly news about space and the MIR, interesting things regarding computers or if programs were send I could calculate when the next lunar eclipse was or when the next full moon would be etc etc etc.

Oh euh.. Rocketscience? Not really. But it was the beginning of the 80s, when home-computers started to become popular and the reign of the IBM PC hadn't started yet... Way cool stuff :-)

Arkanoid as ringing tune

[superkri]

Me too! :)

No Alambik needed

[YeeHaW_Jelte]

I dunno why Retro Radio insists on using Alambik, probably some commercial reason, because the stream is just mp3's
at http://nectarine.ipsyn.net:8002.
Alambik seems to be Internet Explorer/ Windows only.

Re:No Alambik needed

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree Mozilla refused to load the Alambik player. It went to netscape's plugin finder which said I needed NetZip.

Re:No Alambik needed

[SkankhodBeeblebrox]

Opera 6.05 said the same... So it definitely appears the plugin/link are Win/IE limited...

Re:No Alambik needed

[Anonymous Coward]

Ended up loading IE to use that Alambik stuff. Ended up closing it and going back to work. Did hit ctrl-alt-del to bring up my task manager though to check on qlrad.exe and it says that Alambik.exe is loaded 5 seperate times?!? Each time taking up about 4M of ram. What the heck is that all about? Closed them all with no problems, but still, why so many times.

Re:No Alambik needed

[Anonymous Coward]

i tested alambik with mozilla 1.0 , netscape 6 and opera 6.05 and it works fine, Alambik viewer is available for windows only but i sent them a mail and they answered that viewer for linux will be released soon.

About process, i never saw 5 alambik process at the same time, did you report it to them ?

Re:UADE for UNIX plays over 150 Amiga Sound Format

[Anonymous Coward]

Even more astroturfing!

Retro Music ... Ogged!

[Jugalator]

Credits to Machinae Supremacy for using the Ogg Vorbis format to release free retro music and remixes! (and of course for being swedes like me ;) )

Awesome Gianna Sisters Remix
(you know -- that Super Mario clone for Amiga)

Sidology Episode I - Sid Evolution
(mix of great ogged C64 SID music)

Sidology Episode III - Apex Ultima
(more of the same!)

Re:Retro Music ... Ogged!

[n3k5]

> (you know -- that Super Mario clone for Amiga)

no. giana sisters made their debut on the C64 and were the _prototype_ of super mario bros. once you've played both original versions (on the C64 and NES respectively), it becomes obvious that super mario bros. is a shameless rip-off.

Re:Retro Music ... Ogged!

[BigJimSlade]

Sort of on-topic: I noticed that some (if not all) of the music compo entries at Assembly this year were released in Ogg format. Kudos! Now all I need is support for Ogg in iTunes for my TiBook.

Re:Retro Music ... Ogged!

[abiogenesis]

Actually Gianna Sisters (by Rainbow Arts) was published for C64 *after* Mario Bros (by Nintendo), and it can't be a prototype as it was from a different company (and for a different hardware).

As a side note, Nintendo quickly sued Rainbow Arts for imitating their concept, and Gianna Sisters boxes were taken off the shelves. Thus it is hard to find an original copy, and most of us who has played Gianna Sisters has played a pirated version. It is strange that a game that never sold more than a few hundred copies became that popular.

Deathstar's Megademo

[DrunkenPenguin]

Try this demo with UAE or Fellow emulators! Some really great tunes from the legendary DEATHSTAR group.

Re:Deathstar's Megademo

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah! That demo is a killer! The planet explosion intro is still today quite unbelievable cool. A lot of ex-Amiga users are using Linux nowadays, too bad they don't bother making demos anymore. Linux would be ideal platform of choice for these oldskool hackers.

Re:Deathstar's Megademo

[POds]

Many people are still writing Demos. Now they write PPC demos. Once was released just recently. Hopfuly with a new platform, an upgraded OS demo making can make a mini compback?

Demo Competition anyone?

<Taken From Amiga.org>
A.D.A. (Amiga Demoscene Archive) is proud to present Kheshkhash, cooperation demo between Encore and Scenic [5th place at Mekka Symposium 2002]. Many thanks to Fusko for contributing 29 (!) pictures from this graphically stunning PPC demo.
</Taken From Amiga.org>

Re:You're just wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Of all reports from uade users nobody has claimed it is unstable. And it is not. It seems this is just a troll.

Re:America Under Attack

[Anonymous Coward]

I fully agree

NYC = BABYLON

DeliPlayer for Windows

[jamesjw]

I know, I know.. Windows program..
DeliPlayer, a native MOD, C64 and custom Amiga tunes player for Win32.
Thought I'd post the address for it seeing that i use it sometimes when I get nostalgic..

URL is: http://www.deliplayer.com

Maybe useful to those people out there that want to listen to the music from classic Psygnosis games or other custom music formats (195 formats supported including common PC trackers).


Jim.

Waste of bandwidth

[Anonymous Coward]

Get 18000 C64 songs in the transfer volume of 30 minutes 128kBit/s internet radio: The High Voltage SID collection.

Swinth

[Micah]

Anyone remember Swinth and Swinth II on the C64? Produced awesome music and cool laser effects.

I have VICE installed on my Linux box, but last time I tried I couldn't find disk images for it.

I still have my stack of Commodore disks and my C64 and 1541 disk drive, but haven't bothered to look for the cable to connect it to my PC and get the disk images on my Linux box. If I did that I could finally dump the 64.... VICE really does work great.

Re:Swinth

[Anonymous Coward]

What exactly is VICE? Links please.

Re:Swinth

[abiogenesis]

Links...

Re:Swinth

[dillon_rinker]

Yup...good old Swynth. Used to zone out on it for 20-30 minutes ata time. IIRC, it was a combination of two other programs: Swish and Synth Sample (thus the spelling of the name). I've not heard it in fifteen years and can still close my eyes, see the lines, and hear the music. Google doesn't turn up anything useful; anyone got a copy somewhere?

How to Good-Bye Depression

[Anonymous Coward]

I think constricting anus 100 times and denting navel 100 times in succession everyday is effective to good-bye depression and take back youth. You can do so at a boring meeting or in a subway. I have known a 70-year-old man who has practiced it for 20 years. As a result, he has a good complexion and has grown 20 years younger. His eyes sparkle. He is full of vigor, happiness and joy. He has neither complained nor born a grudge under any circumstance. Furthermore, he can make wind three times in succession without drawing out.

In addition, he also can have burned a strong, beautiful fire within his abdomen. It can burn out the dirty stickiness of his body, release his immaterial fiber or third attention, which has been confined to his stickiness. Then, he can shoot out his immaterial fiber or third attention to an object, concentrate on it and attain happy lucky feeling through the success of concentration.

If you don't know concentration, which gives you peculiar pleasure, your life looks like hell.

Syntax Error

[fred_nd]

In Sweden there is a public radio show called syntax Error that plays Scene, Retro, Game and console music every thurstay at 20:30.

For more information and to download the episodes checkout:

http://www.syntaxerror.nu
http://www.ko2000.nu/syntaxerror/
http://www.sr.se/p3/frank/syntax.stm

/Fredrik

If you rather want to download the music..

[hasse]

then check out these:

High Voltage SID Collection which contains about 20.000 sid tunes, downloadable as a 32 mb file (seems to be down right now)

Exotica, lots and lots of vintage Amiga game music and suitable players for download (and check that lovely Team17 logo on their frontpage).

Re:If you rather want to download the music..

[hasse]

Seems that Exotica actually mirrors the High Voltage Collection. It's here.

Download and check out music by old legends like Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway, Jeroen Tel, David Whittaker, etc.

Re:If you rather want to download the music..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, Team17 was something else. I really enjoyed their flipper game.

Rob Hubbard a go-go....

[mccalli]

I can't be the only one who doesn't understand why Rob Hubbard was writing computer game music.

He should have been in a band. A good band. A brilliant band. I would still love to hear One Man and His Droid played by a rock band that knows its stuff...

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Rob Hubbard a go-go....

[ahaning]

Would this be the same Rob Hubbard from dearrob.mod ? I never heard any of his music (AFAIK), but this song is still one of my favorites. Used to listen to it with DMP (shut up!) but now am relegated to the wimpy xmms. If only there was Scream Tracker for linux :-(.

(Actually, at first, I thought you meant Ron Hubbard and was quite surprised to see anyone saying anything good about him here.)

Re:Rob Hubbard a go-go....

[mccalli]

Would this be the same Rob Hubbard from dearrob.mod ? I never heard any of his music (AFAIK)

Not come across that one - at work right now but I'll download tonight and have a listen.

Chances are very strong, though, that the answer is "yes it is the same person". If you've done any C64 gaming, chances are you'll have heard at least something by him.

To find out more about Rob and what he wrote, go to The Complete Works of Rob Hubbard, where there are interviews and downloads. If you've not heard him before, try at least One Man and his Droid, Sanxion, Master of Magic and Commando. Probably International Karate too.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Rob Hubbard a go-go....

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Dear Rob is a tribute to Hubbard composed by Frederic Hahn (who also did well-known covers of Enola Gay and Outrun, and the fantastic music from "Fuzzball". The ingame music sucked, but the title music is fantastic!)

Re:Rob Hubbard a go-go....

[ahaning]

Yeah, I know. I just meant something more along the lines of "is that the same Rob Hubbard as was mentioned in the comments in the song?"

(Yet another thing I miss from ST3/DMP. XMMS doesn't display the instruments.)

Oh well, a good song nonetheless. *ahaning fires up xmms to play it* Hooray, dearrob with 2.1 sound! As opposed to two crappy little speakers and an 8bit ISA SoundBlaster.

(BTW: I'm being very lazy here, I know. I've unpacked the lha and just get a file without an extension. Do I need a C64 emu for this?)

You sick puppy

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't what to see some guy's stretched arse.

Re:UADE for UNIX plays over 150 Amiga Sound Format

[Anonymous Coward]

Deliplayer supports 195 formats compared to UADE's feeble support of ~150. Besides I've noticed that UADE has problems with some songs (can't remember which though).

brand new NES music

[n3k5]

virt just relased his chip tune disk fx 2.0 on monotonik. the professional game musician, who made the soundtracks of several games on the nintendo platform, re-scored 15-year-old nintendo titles from konami, as if he were actually soundtracking them at the time. you can download them there for beer -- and have a look at that great cover!

Why does it always end up like this....

[pomac]

As soon as Amiga is mentioned we get a bunch of uneducated morons running around insulting everyone or just beging pains.

<br>
A radio station like this is what slashdot is to most ppl, a collection of info/news/music that we might not know about. Saying, "Just download this and that" is like saying "Why read slashdot when you can read the other newspapers".<br>
<br>
Why rack down on something that is good, do some research, check the facts, then come back.<br>
<br>
And as i told someone before, This Retro radio is just a relay of Nectarine Radio (url avail in the top comments).<br>

Rick Dangerous songs from Amiga on UNIX.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can obtain amiga songs of Rick Dangerous 1 and 2 from these urls:

http://hangar18.campus.luth.se/exotica/tunes/arc hi ve/CUST-Custom/RickDangerous.lha
http://hangar18. campus.luth.se/exotica/tunes/archi ve/BD-BenDaglish/BD.Rick_Dangerous_2.lha

You can play them with uade: http://www.ee.tut.fi/~heikki/uade.html

uh, just who is the expert...

[Anonymous Coward]

...who says this is f*cking cool?!? Christ, the fact you dorks can even remember those tunes is f*cking pathetic. I guess you prolly played with transformers and shit until you were 15 or 16 as well. Losers.

This *is* Nectarine

[omegas]

The post is a bit misleading... The online radio in question actually is Nectarine, the stream is just played through an online player hosted at theoldcomputer.com. See the Nectarine home page athttp://scenemusic.net/ for more information and stream URLs.

My first computer

[Anonymous Coward]

This takes me back...
My first computer was an Amiga 2000. Expanded to 8mb of RAM, 100mb hard drive, Workbench 2.1 and even a second disk drive. All I ever did with it was play games.

A few years after I bought it I got a 486 bridgeboard emulator so I could play a few games which I couldn't get for the Amiga *cough*DOOM*cough*.

Best damn system ever.

10,000 tracks.

[MrSeb]

I've named 8000 of them so far -- can anyone beat that? :)

Re:10,000 tracks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. You won.

Re:10,000 tracks.

[MrSeb]

Cooool, I rox0r. Thanks, AC.

Blast from the Past Dept.

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you really have to call it that?
We're getting emotionally 'bombarded' media-wise enough at the moment thanks.

Ohh sweet memories!

[miffo.swe]

We have a radioshow here in sweden that plays only this kind of music. I listen to it every time and now with this avaliable i can totally scrap my mp3 collection of Britney Spears!

I think it was "Swynth"

[Just Some Guy]

If anyone finds or has this program, please email me! I've had one of those songs running through my head from the moment I downloaded VICE (and Forbidden Forest :) a few weeks ago.

Arkanoid Ring Tune

[Anonymous Coward]

Man - I think I need a new cell phone... the problem would be that I wouldn't answer the call - I'd just enjoy the music and think of the little spacecraft Vaus, trapped in space warped by someone...

Re:UADE for UNIX plays over 150 Amiga Sound Format

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh.. You're right. It only plays 150 so it's probably rather useless.

And you're quite right about problems. Deliplayer has no problems with any song.

Their Alambik player ate my memory!

[Elphin]

I gave it a listen for half an hour, reliving happy times with Sonic and Mario. Then I got a "your machine is low on virtual memory" warning.

Turns out the Alambik player had consumed 78MB, rising by about 25Kb/second. To descibe it as "leaky" would be an injustice all household objects full of holes.

Use at your peril!

Re:Their Alambik player ate my memory!

[Anonymous Coward]

I contacted them and they are fixing it right now :)

They are cool to answer so fast !

Btw i asked of linux viewer too and they will release it before the end of the year. This scripting language is VERY cool did you check their examples at the-demo.com ? i did, very nice for demo lovers :)

Re:Their Alambik player ate my memory!

[Anonymous Coward]

They released a fix !

Slashdot users power !!

Re:Seems a bit pointless (edit) actually it doesn'

[brandorf]

Well it does have one advantage, this radio station probbably gets past all of the rediculous new webcasting fees.

C64 music played live

[RasmusW]

Well there actually is a danish band playing C64 music on real instruments:

www.pressplayontape.com

I just love their version of Warhawk =)

-Raz

Re:C64 music played live

[DarkDust]

There is a German independent (wave) formation called "Welle: Erdball" (word-for-word translation: Wave: Earthball). They state in their CD booklets that all sounds and effects are directly from a C-64. They even sometimes list the Commodore C-64 as a band member :-) And they make some damn good wave, I tell ya :-)

Here is their homepage, they even have an excellent section dedicated to the C-64 with lots of infos, how and what types of the C-64 they use, what types of C-64 exist, etc. :-) Worth a look.

Re:Kohina - another is at c64.org

[tchapin]

Check it out; I've been listening for a few months...

Don't know how it compares to Nectarine though.

http://c64.org/radio/

Todd

Waste of bandwidth?

[poot_rootbeer]

The Amiga's sound system was 4-channel (2L, 2R) 22kHz, 8-bit, right?

So why is the mp3 stream being broadcast in 128 kbps, 44kHz, 16-bit fidelity?

Re:Waste of bandwidth?

[Ziviyr]

The Amiga's sound system was 4-channel (2L, 2R) 22kHz, 8-bit, right?

It was certainly not limited to 22 KHz, it was also variable.

Re:Waste of bandwidth?

[Anonymous Coward]

4 channel (2L, 2R) 28kHz 8-bit (1 dma channel for each audio channel). With certain video modes 56kHz.

Also, it was possible to combine two channels into one channel so that you get 14-bit audio (with DMA). However, I haven't seen any validation for accuracy of 14-bit audio. In practice only very few applications used 14 bit sounds.

Re:Waste of bandwidth?

[Anonymous Coward]

It could do approx 30khz in DMA mode, and approx 60khz if the CPU jumped in.
Also, there was a hack to combine two channels so you would get 14 bit sound.
This all on a bog-standard A500.

Alambik for Linux

[kguilber]

I emailed them. Within a couple minutes I received a response saying they hope to have the Linux viewer out by the end of this year.

Nectarine is the BEST. I've donated to them.

[Viewsonic]

Simply because that stream is the BEST music EVER to code to. It's very nostalgic, and really gets you in the frame of mind to do some serious coding for hours on end. They do take donations, and I hope they are around forever.

Re:Nectarine is the BEST. I've donated to them.

[Jugalator]

lol.. Yes, I find their music good to code to as well. :) I should really listen more to them since I tend to forget about the station. :-P And donate too.

This kind of thing pisses me off

[drinkypoo]

What do we have here? A bunch of MOD and SID tunes, being converted to a stream, and then pushed out over the internet.

Why can't they just 'stream' me the MOD or SID and let me play it with something on my local system? It would substantially reduce bandwidth use.

Re:This kind of thing pisses me off

[g!sys1]

It turns out that they don't only support C64 and Amiga tunes, but also Atari, MSX, Nintendo, etc. I suppose it would be a little difficult maintaining a player that supports all of these different formats and their correct (!) emulation.

As I understand it, it's difficult enough to write a player for all the different Soundtracker formats, e.g. MOD/S3M/XM/OCT/... The MP3 format just ensures that the music gets played as intended.

Gunnar

Re:This kind of thing pisses me off

[drinkypoo]

The only difficulty I've seen with trackers is that none of them that I can find these days play Protracker mods right. The last player I had which did it properly (besides MED) was Intuitracker, AKA Buggy POS, on AmigaDOS.

Apparently Protracker has both the usual speed command found in mods and a tempo command. If you change the tempo it remembers the previous tempo, and if you set tempo to '0' it's supposed to return to the previous tempo.

Instead, almost every tracker treats tempo as an alias to speed and when you set tempo to '0' it starts playing at speed 0, not the previous tempo.

Regardless winamp (and probably xmms) will play NT/PT/FT/XM/S3M/MED/OktaMED, with the caveat that they screw up PT. You can see this effect on the classic MOD "Klisje Paa Klisje" which is a demotune from Cryptoburners.