Amiga {music}

I dusted off my old Amiga 500+ during the week. Actually, I took it out from under the bed where it's been sitting for years. At one point in its life, for about 30 minutes, it had been sitting on a skip when we were moving house in the late 90's. Yeah, at the time it seemed like clutter to be bringing with me, but sexy clutter, like gold underpants!

So anyway, there I was going through my bag of cover disks (I was always more of a cover-disk game-demo man, than full games. I experienced more stuff that way). I came across a disk with protracker on it, a popular music tracker for the Amiga. I remembered fumbling around with it years ago, not really knowing what I was doing, but last week, with a few years of music creating under my belt... [I still didn't have a clue :-p ] I at least knew what was happening and why it was happening. It was awesome to see and understand the notion of four mono-track limited MOD files to create all those wonderful game tunes from years ago.

I later switched off my Amiga once again, once I had my fill of games and demo's and I decided to lash out a bit of "Amiga music" of my own (in Reason). To Be honest, I just wanted to mess around with the limitations music programmers found themselves back then i.e. 4 tracks, two panned left and two panned right, 8bit 22khz short samples etc. So this has no real musical merit, and I think I went OTT on the bit crushing of the sounds, but it was fun to mess about with. A bit of pseudo-DnB near the end too! Oh and yes, in the great tradition of MOD music, the tune is designed to loop.

Amiga by GammagOblin

The image is a photograph I took of the Amiga's "Guru Meditation" screen. This is basically like the Amiga's version of Windows BSOD. I got this a lot last week, with all those dusty coverdisks :)