Somewhere Only We Know - Beepola Music
I recently thought how nice it would be to make some music for the games I have been creating on the ZX Spectrum and started playing around with Beepola, a fantastic free collection of machine language music engines for the Spectrum beeper. The 16k and 48k machines only sported a single channel beeper and in the early days that was pretty much all that came out of the speaker, but my first recollection of something different was on first playing Manic Miner by Matthew Smith. Not only did the game have a multi-channel into theme but the game also played music continuously whilst playing the game! Unheard of!
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| My first recollection of 'real' music in a game! |
Flash forwards 30 years and in-game music has come a long way, lots of games featured in-game music and the the 128k Spectrum and everything that followed were endowed with a three-channel audio via the AY-3-8912 chip. Well I haven't got round to playing with the 128k and it's sound capabilities but instead I downloaded 'Beepola' and had a go at creating a multi-channel tune using the original beep.
There are lots of different 'engines' built into the program, which runs in Windows, each having different capabilities and each sounding different to each other because of this. Some are designed to play 'in-game' music, others for better quality sound and effects. I programmed 'Somewhere Only We Know' by Keane using one of the engines which supports 4 channel sound and drums. The program can export to TAP file and even creates a simple loader for you. I created a loading screen and edited the TAP file to accommodate it.
I loved the version Lily Allen recorded for the John Lewis 2013 Christmas advert so I used an image from the advert for the loading screen.
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