Stan's Previously Owned Soundtracks
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2013–2025
1:14 · 191K views · Jul 22, 2011
The Secret of Monkey Island intro theme played through the internal PC speaker. It is a tribute to LucasArts.
HN shares it for nostalgia about the tinny PC speaker sound of early adventure games.
4 comments from Hacker News
> Where in the article does it say "the code in question ... is displayed on screen"? As someone else mentioned, it shows up in the GIF animation, about 45 seconds in, as a sequence of text boxes. [LINK] > Your assertion about "reliable way of making basic sounds" is sort of true, if you ignore the shonky hardware that used to and get shipped as a "speaker". On the IBM PC, one of the channels on the PIT (programmable interval timer) was hooked up to a speaker. It didn't sound great, but it could at least make simple tones on its own, and even music, without sucking up too much CPU time: this video The Apple II had it much worse. It had a built-in speaker as well, but no timers -- the speaker was connected directly to the memory address $C030, such that performing a read or write operation on that address would toggle the state of the speaker (on/off). Playing a tone required the CPU to hit that address in an appropriately sized loop; since the CPU wasn't particularly fast to begin with, it was nearly impossible to play audio while anything else was going on.
Yes. 35 years ago, the family PC-clone didn't have any dedicated audio hardware, just the built-in speaker, and that was pretty common. A couple years later, we got a "Sound Blaster" card (more likely, a clone). That provides a FM synthesis chip (typically used for music), and PCM audio output (for sound effects, voice, video playback) that doesn't require constant load on the CPU (it was possible to output scratchy digital audio on the PC Speaker, but CPU-intensive). If you've heard music from the Sega Genesis, that's the same Yamaha FM Synthesis technology (details differ, of course). So, games would often support different audio hardware. Here's a favorite: this video (Secret of Monkey Island theme, PC Speaker) [LINK] (Secret of Monkey Island theme, Adlib/OPL2/FM synthesis, common option for PC sound hardware) [LINK] (Secret of Monkey Island theme, Roland MT-32/Linear Arithmetic synthesis, premium hardware, likely what the music was originally composed for)
Awesome! The future rolls on. Thanks! This message for anyone who frantically dug through the box for Disk 22, confusedly hoping to find it among the ~6 installation disks [1]: I excitedly clicked through, hoping, jonesing, for the Monkey Island theme. Alas, sound doesn't seem to work for me (Chromium 26, Debian). If you needed the same fix, you can find it here: this video [1]: [LINK]
That music on tinny computer speakers (if you didn't have Soundblasters at the time) was something else: this video I think it was here on HN that I previously read a comment breaking down how the PC speaker could only play one tone at a time, but the team managed to simulate two overlapping melodies