BTW, if you want to compare the Monkey Island title music for all platforms the game was ported to (and some it wasn't ported to, looking at you C64), take a look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DydmYhaL7zw
For me, the Amiga version brings back the fondest memories - 4 channels of glorious 8-bit sampled sound! Unfortunately two of those channels were hardwired to the left speaker and two to the right speaker, so listening with headphones is not so great, but still...
I kind of prefer this other video by LGR on the subject of monkey island title music through different PC music devices. It does not have the commodore 64 as it only cover PC, it more devices and illustrate how different the same song is on same platform with different hardware.
Yeah, that really shows how much effort they (had to) put into supporting the variety of PC sound cards - although by the 90s most (affordable) cards were (or claimed to be) "AdLib/SoundBlaster-compatible". But I still like the video I posted better - I mean, there were (and partly still are) other systems out there than the PC, let's not forget that! And I originally played Monkey Island on the Amiga, so that version has a special place in my heart...
It's amazing how the PC speaker version has a Melody, but also chords and accompaniment, even though only one frequency can be played at a time. There's so much going on it sounds impossible.
I really wanna know how this was done, presumably by offsetting all the various sounds. Maybe very short notes jumping around, perhaps the raggae style off-beats help.
There's a big documentary on Monkey island on YouTube, unfortunately it doesn't go much into the music.
The PC speaker version is really clever. It's arranged in a way that suggests to the listener that multiple voices are present, but they can only hear the most prominent one that's active at any given time. The arpeggiated chords (marimba on other arrangements) help with this; in other cases, a background note is offset slightly to make it "peek" around the edges of the lead.
There even used to be a driver for Win 3.x that allowed playing digitized sound via the PC speaker as if it was a real soundcard. It was (unsurprisingly) very CPU intensive so not useful for games.
> It's amazing how the PC speaker version has a Melody, but also chords and accompaniment, even though only one frequency can be played at a time.
The PC speaker doesn't play a single frequency, it toggles between “on” and “off”. There's techniqueels to drive so that it looks to be next level of softwarr like it is playing a single frequency, or like it has, e.g., an 8-bit position setting, or...a number of other things. But even those super-basic things are illusions over toggling at appropriate times, not the native function of the speaker
> Wouldn't toggling off and on 8000 times per second be the same as playing 8KHz?
Sure. But its not “tell the speaker to play an 8kHz frequency”. The speaker doesn't inherently play “one frequency”, it just toggles on and off when you tell it to. If you tell it to toggle on and off based on a function driven by the combination of an 8kHz cycle and, say, a 2.5kHz cycle it will do that, too.
...and I think that's exactly the technique the "Monkey Island PC-Speaker coders" used to overlay the percussion over the melody. The IBM PC and its descendants had the advantage of having a relatively fast CPU which could partly make up for the primitive sound system - i.e. it could only play a square wave, but it could be a very complex square wave. Some games even played voice samples - they were extremely distorted, but more or less understandable. Similar to how you can show photos on a monochrome display (like the good old Hercules) - they won't look pretty, but you can do it...
Playing "8KHz audio" is not the same thing as a playing an "8KHz frequency" (which yes in this case is a actually a square wave, so technically its Fourier transform shows other frequencies being played - but the programmer only gets to set the frequency of the square wave).
Additionally since this game as well as many others from the era can be configured to output MIDI data you can buy new midi hardware and continue to hear how we've developed this kind of sampling! https://twitter.com/GyoJc/status/1304638489313644546
For a time when stereo was new for recorded music, the Beatles and the Doors both like to really play with that ability. They would put some tracks on just one ear, so that only the people with the latest stereo equipment could truly enjoy the work as intended.
For me, the Amiga version brings back the fondest memories - 4 channels of glorious 8-bit sampled sound! Unfortunately two of those channels were hardwired to the left speaker and two to the right speaker, so listening with headphones is not so great, but still...