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Playing the music included in every Atari 8-bit


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Well, this is a longshot, but I figure here is the place to ask. A long time ago a friend of mine found reference in an Atari book or magazine about some "music" that is included in the ROM of every Atari 8-bit system. A simple Atari BASIC program that PEEKs a series of memory locations and feeds the value to a SOUND statement is all that is required to play this music. The "song" is about 10 seconds long but can be looped. The program was as simple as something like this:

10 FOR I=25000 TO 35000  -- I don't remember the exact values.
20 X=PEEK(I)
30 SOUND X... or something.  I don't remember the syntax or usage.
40 NEXT I
50 GOTO 10

It took a dedicated short loop like this to play the music at full speed in Atari BASIC. We were able to use some sort of gosub with a timer to do a little graphics work without messing up the music too badly. Under Turbo-Basic XL I was able to use a timer routine to keep the music playing while I did all sorts of other calculations. I made a big demo program for a user group meeting that played the music during the title screen. I remember taking attention away from some new 520 ST demo. I was very proud.

 

I was hoping somebody here remembered this music and/or how to create it. I'd really like to hear it again.

Edited by Troy H. Cheek
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I think I know what you're referring to. There was a short routine to play an algorithmically generated tune. The idea that it was in ROM was kind of a joke.

 

There is a tune in ROM, but it's the Self-Test tune from Mussorgsky.

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Entirely possible - Self Test is from $5000-$57FF which corresponds to decimal 20480 - 22527 and the tune is likely just stored as a sequence of AUDF values only since there's only a few notes and no fancy stuff like ADSR.

You'd need a Poke in there somewhere to swap in the required piece of Rom so the program modifications needed:

 

 

5 POKE 54017,125
10 FOR I=20480 TO 22527
30 SOUND 0,X,10,10
35 FOR D=1 TO 80 : NEXT  D
50 END

 

OK - I didn't work out where the music is stored or an optimum delay period there. You'd need to run that, listen carefully and hit Break when you've heard the tune.

Then do ? I to get the value of I - modify the program so the initial value is a bit less than current value of I and finish value a bit higher.

Then Run it again and adjust the loop until it fits.

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What I think he's talking about is a little program that was in either ANALOG or Antic (I read both and I saw it & typed it in). It was only a few lines of BASIC and had no DATA, but it played a neat & simple little tune by the way it manipulated the SOUND command. I don't think it actually read anything from memory but the author said it was playing a tune hidden in every Atari computer.

 

It would take me forever to find it again...

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The Self Test tune is hardcoded - the trouble of writing a program to extract from Rom would be kind of pointless, there's only 6 notes.

 

It could be done in a single line in fact (the delay values need a bit of tweaking)

 

 

10 FOR N=1 TO 6:READ F,D:SOUND 0,F,10,8:FOR Z=1 TO D:NEXT Z:NEXT N:SOUND 0,0,0,0:DATA 81,200,91,200,68,200,60,70,45,70,53,150
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Thanks to everyone who's responded so far. It is most certainly not the self test tune. I don't think my friend's Atari 800 even had that option. This was not a simple collection of notes. It was raw and noisy and almost sounded like a badly sampled piece of music (low bit rate, poorly wired mic, clipping, etc). And I'm almost positive it involed PEEKing in memory locations, because I seem to remember we changed the start and ending values on the FOR loop to 0 TO 65535 trying to hear "the whole song." That just resulted in a bunch of squeals, static, silence, the little bit of music we'd already heard, more static.

 

Here is me trying to re-create the music. Don't judge me. I actually have a half decent singing voice. http://youtu.be/GEbINsaQgbs

 

And I am likewise shocked to find out that the self test music is the opening line of a classical music piece. I shouldn't be surprised, since every C-64 commercial in the early 80's had the same classical tune playing in the background. I can't remember the name or composer, but now it's stuck in my head.

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