Canyon.mid
(canyonmid.com)304 points by LorenDB a day ago
304 points by LorenDB a day ago
VGA on a Tandy 1000 wasn't all that unusual. Most if not all of the earlier Tandy 1000 models that had ISA slots could take a VGA card in them. The hardware worked fine (it's just memory bus accesses under 1mb and I/O port instructions), it just depended on software support to do anything with it. Tandy's magazine PCM often listed and rated add-in VGA cards. I remember reading of a later version of DeskMate that supported VGA resolution.
The late Lonnie Falk would have been happy to see that PCM did such a good job of covering Radio Shack's computers that it is thought of as Tandy's magazine. Falsoft's line of magazines covering that area probably added at least a few million to Tandy's bottom line.
You remind me that I didn't have a sound card at the time and I played all my games (mostly LucasArts) with the PC speaker. For me, the MIDI versions are too boring as they lack the "raw electric power" of the speaker that I loved for years.
I had a completely different experience. The moment we played Monkey Island for the first time after installing our brand new SoundBlaster-compatible cheap soundcard, bought with the money a couple of early teenagers can have, well, it was GLORIOUS. I still remember it vividly 30+ years later.
For me it was Epic Pinball on a Sound Blaster 16. Playing Duke Nukem 1 was awesome and all(wish I could go back) but when I heard the intro to Epic Pinball come out of these speakers:
https://assets.superhivemarket.com/store/product/190602/imag...
It was one of those moments where computers blew my 8 year old mind, I was never the same.
If you did have one, it might be in the list of sound fonts on this incredible(!) player: https://chiptune.app/?q=canyon.mid
The midi versions are also pretty boring compared to the Amiga versions of the LucasArts soundtracks to be honest.
Well put!
You may enjoy chiptunes. Wikipedia has samples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiptune (see: Contemporary chiptune music)
What exactly was the difference between PC speakers and MIDI? Why do we no longer need a MIDI device today to play the “correct” sound?
The PC speaker could only play square waves, and had only one voice.
There is no "correct" sound for a MIDI file as it's just note and tempo data. But many people probably associate them with the OPL2 synthesizer chip on AdLib and early SoundBlaster cards. [1]
Now that we have high fidelity digital sound output on even the cheapest computers/devices, at least 44 kHz, at least two channels, and at least 16 bits per sample, we can emulate (or play a recording of) anything.
[1] Personally I remember this midi file sounding different/better. Maybe because I'm remembering using a Sound Blaster AWE64 while playing these things in Windows?
There's a "correct" sound in that the MIDI standard itself doesn't specify a standard instrument assignment. For that, there's General MIDI but also entirely different approaches (like the MT-32 instrument assignment, which predates General MIDI) and extensions to General MIDI (like Roland's GS and Yamaha's XG). Some didn't have a standard assignment at all (like the FB-01). Even the Adlib and earlier Soundblaster cards didn't have exactly GM compatible MIDI playback drivers; General MIDI specifies a minimum number of 24 simultaneous voices, and an OPL2 or even a pair of them can't satisfy that requirement.
There's also a "correct" sound insofar that the tracks were usually arranged using one sound module or another. Even when devices are compatible in the sense that they have adopted the same standard, hearing music on another device than the one the soundtrack was originally arranged for will cause some degradation, because the standards are only loosely specified in terms of timbre, volume levels, envelopes etc.
Some DOS games have specific arrangements for a variety of different kinds of MIDI devices for these reasons, with different mix levels and instrument setup, sometimes scaled down arrangements, adjustments for the instrument patches and even loading entirely new patches onto the devices.
"The PC speaker could only play square waves, and had only one voice."
I am reminded of Mean Streets and Martian Memorandum, which let the PC speaker output something beyond just bleeps and bloops.
So Sony figured out something called a “1-bit DAC”. It’s something like dither, and so was the method of generating voice audio in Mean Streets.
When they say "PC Speaker" they mean that thing that beeps when your computer fails to boot being used to play music, not normal speakers vs dedicated midi device.
As others have already said, MIDI is a spec and does not contain any actual sounds. General Midi's big thing was probably its defined list of sounds but that was really only a naming convention.
The great thing about MIDI is that it is easily routable to any number of things (physical instruments, samplers, etc.).
Being able to listen to Sonic 2 - Chemical Zone with a combination of a Minimoog Model D and a Jun-6 (basically a Juno-6) is unbelievably fun.
Why did we kill all that beautiful minimalism? Computers had enough gaming, entertainment and productivity back then. But the definition of "enough" kept changing. Like a carrot tied to stick attached to an animal.
This is more commentary on the nature of personality and taste than of computers.
It’s human nature to think of familiar things from our youth as the height of achievement. That was the time of the best music, the best movies, the best culture, the best sports, the best everything. No matter if you were born in 1950 or 1990.
To be fair, the quality of software has dramatically dropped, apps now take 10 seconds to load, memory usage is maxed, games crash and people needed to reinstall their OS so frequently that Microsoft literally added a "reset PC" option..
You can argue that software does much more than before, sure I agree but no one asked for so much bloat and features in every day apps. My note taking app doesn't need AI.
> To be fair, the quality of software has dramatically dropped, apps now take 10 seconds to load, memory usage is maxed, games crash and people needed to reinstall their OS so frequently that Microsoft literally added a "reset PC" option..
Are you talking about the 90s or now? Because those were all at least as true then as now. Everything took forever. You needed more RAM every month. Everything crashed constantly. I had to reinstall Win98SE so many fucking times that I can still type F73WT-WHD3J-CD4VR-2GWKD-T38YD from memory.
The amount of suck in commercial software is constant. Companies always prioritize adding the shiny-looking features that sell software to rubes over improving things like memory use, response time, and general quality of life until the quality of life is actually bad enough to drive customers to another vendor, so it's perpetually bad enough to keep the average customer right on the edge of "oh fuck this, I'm switching to something else."
Apps take 10 seconds to load? Which apps, on what system?
My whole machine reboots in less than 10 seconds. I haven’t seen a blue screen of death in a decade. I haven’t had significant data loss from a failed drive or a corrupt machine in.. I can’t remember. Even DaVinci Resolve is ready to run in a few short seconds.
This is all on a machine I bought 6-8 years ago. I reboot my phone and watch and laptop when I think to, not because I have to. I run half a dozen browsers and hundreds of tabs and play YouTube while waiting for a remote machine to deploy to an immutable temp instance that gets destroyed after every test cycle.
I speak to my AIs and I can live and work anywhere on this planet that legally allows me.
There are problems in our world and on our machines and in our governments but apps don’t take 10 seconds to load.
Except ServiceNow. I’ll give you that one.
>To be fair, the quality of software has dramatically dropped
Part of my job when I was a youngn, was rebooting the Windows NT server running the software router because packets stopped forwarding for the entire net cafe.
I don’t know what period your referencing but software quality wasn’t exactly amazing back in the day. It did mandate a higher degree of validation before release due to the distribution nature (physical media as opposed to a download) but even then some remarkably dumb bugs made it out the door
Software quality has massively improved across every dimension. Memory constraints are basically non-existent for most people. Software is more reliable, discoverable and portable than at any time in history. The idea that reinstalling your OS is more common today than 30 years ago is just obviously not true. We are currently living through a golden age of software.
I had found often not only adding too much bloat and stuff but also often lacks stuff which is actually useful. (I wrote programs the way that I do, in order to try to avoid the problems; it is not perfect but in some ways it helps.)
> It’s human nature to think of familiar things from our youth as the height of achievement. That was the time of the best music, the best movies, the best culture, the best sports, the best everything. No matter if you were born in 1950 or 1990.
Is it? I think there's a common tendency to "stop exploring" cultural artifacts very deeply as we age, but not everyone shares this trait. Some people continue to value novelty in those areas well into old age.
For my part, treasured artifacts of my youth don't impede my ability to appreciate new things. And indeed, I think many videogames I loved dearly have aged poorly.
I don't think nostalgia is the only factor here. If it were, then no young people would be interested in old computers, which I have found not to be the case.
I don't know. I'm glad I no longer have a tower which makes so much noise with its fads and that big ugly screens from my younger years. I far more prefer my current settings. Well, I didn't have so much noise with my very first computer, an Amstrad 6128, but I don't really miss "run paper" that much either.
And to me the best desktop experience in term of software has been gnome 3 after it had time to hone its jump forward from its previous major release. So, not the newest hot thing out there, but not my first crush.
Regarding forward, augmented reality on glasses seems to have great potentials, but I don't have much hope foe the default systems they will come with. A future where most people wear those stuff filled with signal tailored by the ad industry and whatever governments is just not letting much room escaping the obvious various dystopian scenarios.
And what if this isn't nostalgia, but rather a feeling in people that correlates with external pressure?
U.S. debt in the 1950s was well below $1T, in the 1990s it was something around $3T, now it's $36T.
In other words, I believe at some point there will be a social study explaining that what was mistakenly taken as nostalgia in previous generations is not the same feeling in post-90s generations, simply because the world started collapsing faster and some major economic indicators are objective proof of this - actual accelerating decline rather than just romanticizing the past.
I seriously doubt nostalgia for old computers correlates to perceptions of U.S. debt.
Having said that, I wasn’t the only person deeply upset when Greenspan gave the green light for Bush’s tax cuts. Under Clinton we were on track to wipe out the debt in another 10 years.
I'm not talking about old computers themselves, but rather something that's mistakenly taken as nostalgia.
Things in the 90s were more straightforward because supply chains and business processes were much shorter and less complex. What people interpret as nostalgia might actually reflect a recognition that systems/products genuinely were more efficient before they became increasingly layered with intermediaries and dependencies.
An illustration of these dependencies and layers is debt - the mounting complexity parallels the mounting debt levels.
Games are now infinitely more complex -- I can run an improved version of Ultima VII (1992) on a device that fits in my pocket, while the original wouldn't have run on this (it required a 486 and even the latest possible Tandy systems maxed out at the 386), and that's not even getting into stuff like Factorio or Satisfactory.
Simply because games these days are exactly designed to extract dopamine from people, and in the 90s they were mostly driven by pain.
Objectively speaking, computers back in the 90's were not capable of organizing the information that a single human being would be interested in, let alone the information of a community or state or country or the world.
I am happy with the potential that we have available today to do things that we couldn't in the past. And it's always possible to improve software on top of more capable hardware and OSes.
Asceticism doesn't generate revenue. That's why striving capital needs a population that consumes more, and fat in technologies is not an exception.
Software in the '90s was mostly driven by altruism, software in '20s starts with an A-round.
The first funding round for a startup. "Series A", "Series B", etc.
(… although there are sometimes "seed" rounds that precede a series A, or even pre-seed rounds … like everything else, it's complicated & messy. But hopefully you see the metaphor the parent was trying to paint.)
I think business competition has killed the minimality. Because minimality doesn't sell as a quality. Competitor would throw more power and more features into the market. It is not driven by the need for such power or features. Consumer is forced to move to a bloated product as minimal products are removed or made extinct due to incompatible ecosystem.
Because high-speed internet became omnipresent. The act of making a software release stopped having a cost associated with it, like having to print CDs and ship them to stores. Software transitioned from meaningful releases, each of which needed to be as bug-free as possible and had to be sold to users as a genuine meaningful upgrade, to this pathetic eternal beta we now have.
Also because everyone seems too scared to practice adversarial interoperability.
Also because SoCs are now a thing which allows unhackable secure boot and other DRM-like functionality that prevents people from modifying their own devices to act in their own interest, or, as is the case with Android devices, allows it but punishes the user for having gained full access to their own device.
It's funny how you want minimalism yet another commenter commented about an experimental OS needing to have a modern UI to be relevant. Just can't win.
Modern technology has made it a lot easier to build video games or entertainment (music, movies, etc) affordably and in a reasonable amount of time. The diversity of entertainment out there for you to experience cheaply is incredible compared to the 90s or 00s, even if we lost some stuff like Flash along the way.
Nearly 19000 games were released on Steam in 2024. A lot of the most interesting stuff that came out simply wouldn't have existed 10 or 20 years ago. I think it's great that those things can exist now and potentially find an audience.
On Linux you can customize your UI to achieve any look you want.
- A Windows 3.1 window manager theme
- The Windows 3.1 fonts with font hinting/antialiasing disabled
- Windows 3.1 icons
- A matching cursor theme
- Lower your display resolution
This is a silly question.
It will never be enough until we can manipulate the fabric of space and time directly as gods and create entirely new universes and physics and live forever for an infinity infinities.
The ratio of our infinitesimal, geologically small existence to the whole of the light cone and the observable universe - it is just a glimpse at the fractal of what will be enough to satiate our curiosity and desire.
This.
The same drive for betterment that made our species “kill such beautiful minimalism” was the one that lifted billions out of subsistence farming and 50% infant death rate, and will be the one to escape the destruction of planet earth by sun’s evolution. You cannot have one without the other.
There is societal improvement and then there is the huge amount of ego driven waste and externalized harm. Ideally, theoretically, we could have a lot of the former without a lot of the latter. In practice this ratio seems to be getting worse. Me-first attitudes are way up, profit is misunderstood as merit.
I don't think OP is asking whether we should give up looking for advances in astrophysics. OP is asking "why did we add all of these freaking popups and theme tweaks? They're distracting me from using my computer to make advances in astrophysics!"
I'd say try Linux.
Moving in that direction, even recursive infinities won't bring someone anywhere near satisfaction, contentment and delight.
Curiosity and desire can be focused on minimalism and elegance of the smallest most essential cores of whatever is at stake.
The creator of Canyon.mid, George Stone, was interviewed here: https://pixelatedaudio.com/canyon-mid/
his story reminds me of Elwood Edwards:
In the side bar was 'You've Got Mail' Voice Elwood Edwards Dies at 74[1] from 7 months ago. Among all the nostalgia from the MIDI sounds in here that was a bit of a downer.
yep, that made the front page here when it happened. Not black bar but it was I think in the top 5.
I'm slightly impressed that the video (3.4 MB) is only 100 times larger than the original MIDI (33 kB)
I remember being _very_ frustrated as a child that the music in "Hover!" sounded significantly different when we upgraded from our 486 to a Pentium II machine. The Sound Blaster gave the music a very distinct quality that was lacking in the software MIDI synthesizer.
I'm not surprised. Generally the default number of frames between key/I-frames is set pretty low because too many I frames in a row tend to look bad on video content that isn't static and also if you jump to a point between 2 I frames the video can look really weird becasue it hasn't updated the I frame the P frames are manipulating.
If you like that kind of thing: manufacturers used to create demo songs for synth keyboards and modules:
* Emu Proteus 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5FffG_0sqw
* Emu Proteus 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4KW9uWCY3A
* Roland MT-32: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdSKg5G9MPc&t=22s
* Roland D-10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXGdyp7Ml-Y
* Roland SC-33: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as_jVNIvleI (complete with MIDI animation)
* Yamaha MU100: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BL_RzeWDxg (1 hour!)
Etc. Don't know if they still do, but it was a thing when these "romplers" came on the market.
Please please please NEVER disable video player controls. Like a fool I didn't lower my system volume, and got blasted with maximum volume of the YouTube video.
If your YT/Winamp/whatever volume isn't at 100%, then what you're doing is:
1. generate audio signal
2. reduce volume of that signal, losing information because it's quantised
3. take that volume-reduced signal and boost it right back up again, but now with the lower bits destroyed
You can make this effect as bad as you like, e.g. turn it down to 1% and then amplify by 100x... but why?
The loss of information from a reduction of bit depth is purely a reduction of signal-to-noise ratio; the least significant bit is dithered to eliminate quantization distortion. In normal domestic listening scenarios this is usually imperceptible, because the noise floor imposed by dither is below the threshold of hearing for any reasonable gain staging.
https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/what-is-dithering-in-audio....
Because in order to get the best dynamic range while listening to diverse music, you need to detect the loudness of tracks and albums and adjust the gain of each track/album accordingly. In order to have room for the music player to adjust the volume higher for quieter tracks, you need to apply a "pregain" to lower the volume overall, while turning up your speakers to compensate. This solves the problem, but by doing this, your music player will generally have a lower volume relative to all other applications on the system, meaning that it generally will be desirable to turn down application-specific volume knobs accordingly.
More information: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuEtQqC-Sqo
I'm a bit star-struck to have you reply to my somewhat offhand comment, am aware of your audio player work and really want to be a Zig convert (just missing those vec3 and complex operators, having equal mathematical standing to ints and floats) and your original Zig intro video is IMO one of the best tech presentations of all time, but I digress...
I'm aware of ReplayGain and this processing is important for per-track overall gain, but what I'm getting at is lower level: instead of there being two lossy/rounded stages of dimming and amplification, you want to communicate to the OS a log2 "dimming factor", so that this can be subtracted from a later log2 amplification factor such that we ideally waste no processing time if the sum is zero, and otherwise don't suffer the twice-quantised signal degradation (at most one accurate scaling pass, instead of two arbitrarily precision-reducing ones). It's maybe a minor point / imperceptible as others have noted, but IMO this seems like the Correct (TM) approach.
I don't think this is true in practice anymore. Given that most sources are 16 bit wide, and afaik most OSes internally use 24 bits these days in the OS mixer (at least my laptop does), the information loss is negligible (just some rounding errors and that's it).
I'd be much more worried about 44.1khz sources being resampled to 48khz if that's the OS playback rate. I mean you won't be able to hear that either in practice but at least it's not negligible.
I just like to have my audio samples divisible by a (preferably large) power of two — what's wrong with that? Sounds more crispy that way.
I do not want to have to go hunt down the app in a list of all currently running apps in some os-level mixer to turn down or up one app. It is absolutely both an os and an app function. Both are needed.
It's a problem because the OS doesn't mandate control. If every app had to function via OS volume controls and APIs, the world would be a wonderful place.
Truly first-class audio with sublime control plane ergonomics.
That'll never happen since any random app developer can just multiply audio volume by a float in whatever API and attach their own unique take on a slider. I'll merit the cases where you need to have individual level and channel controls, such as editing software and professional music tools, but most apps are not these.
It's times like this when I do appreciate Apple's dictatorial take on things, though even they could not win this fight.
Yes and no.
Clearly there is a need to give different volumes to different apps, so you can have quiet background music while a timer app is louder, or Zoom is louder.
Ideally there would be an OS-level mixer to independently set the volume of each app. I believe Windows has this, Mac definitely doesn't. And for convenience, an app's local volume control would exist, but set it at the OS mixer level, so you don't have them competing with each other.
But without this, an app does have to have local volume controls.
Also, it's important to be able to set gain as well, i.e. turn the volume "above 100%". For those YouTube videos that for some reason are only 5% as loud as other videos. Even better is if you can set the gain per-video so that it won't be absurdly loud and clipping when you move on to the next video.
Bonus points if an OS or media player ever gives the option of a dynamic compressor, so you can actually listen to those amateur podcasts where one speaker's microphone is 10x quieter than another's. Or listen to the quiet parts of classical music recordings even in the presence of background noise.
> Mac definitely doesn't
https://github.com/kyleneideck/BackgroundMusic and others.
Not affiliated at all but just came across and I wish this was built in to windows: https://github.com/File-New-Project/EarTrumpet
It pauses when I click on it. Firefox on linux.
There are no controls to indicate that you can pause and restart, but this just-click-anywhere-to-play/pause has been standard on all video players everywhere for a long time.
Could media player actually just play midi dumps like this back in the day?
I've been on Linux for so long now, that being able to just play a MIDI file without making a bunch of decisions about soundfonts and synthesizers [1] just seems mind-blowing to me now.
Part of me wishes that just by default, mpv or something would just pick a softsynth and just play it (like WMP here) rather than have me install a separate program, pick a sound font, invoke it in some weird way to let it know what soundfont I want, and not even be able to seek back and forth.
[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/MIDI#List_of_SoundFonts
Windows and macOS have both bundled similar low-quality licensed versions of a Roland GS sample set and low-quality software synthesisers since the late 1990's. Neither of them are as good as even the lowest-end dedicated hardware General MIDI synth from Roland was, but they're still better than nothing. You're unlucky because you happen to be using Linux. unfortunately the best in that field was and remains proprietary so this will probably never be solved on that platform.
mods are still alive, and crazier than ever -- proof that 4 channels is all you need! https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/?file=ma-205456
Yes, there was even a <bgsound> HTML tag to play MIDI files, which was heavily used in places like Geocities.
I remember some of the songs that came with the Sound Blaster, like this one: https://youtu.be/eqU4CkbK1X0
What a step up it was over the bleeps that came out of the PC. Like going from B&W to color TV. Advances like that were commonplace back then.
I can imagine some 14 year olds in the playground:
"The Qamiga has 16 qubit sound dude!"
"Yeah, but it uses quantum annealing! You can hear the entropy loss in the higher frequencies!"
there's something steady about this setup. no rush to replace, just quiet continuity. a system that kept adapting without losing itself. not optimized, just enough. canyon.mid plays like it always did. the zip drive fits because it earned its place. nothing here is pretending. it's all real use, stretched across years. machines like this taught patience. they gave back what you put in.
My parent's Thorn music centre came with a cassette with Herb Alpert's Taste of Honey (although probably not the original).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRGOm071sE0
And I still love that tune.
Note: It sounded differently on different sound cards because their wavetable/sound fonts/MIDI chips were different, so there was no canonical, universal rendering of MID files.
For those who remember... :) man I miss when things are simpler, slower, maybe more manual, more tedious, but more configurable, more buggy, but more creative. I understand we got here through multiple step changes of improvements, but I'm just nostalgic - good memories!
The Zip drive in the picture feels slightly anachronistic though. Technically it isn’t, having been release a few months before Windows 95, but still.
I mean... to be super honest, I was there, and 1998 was ALSO Windows 3.1 era. The future is not evenly distributed and a TON of people in 1998 still had Windows 3.1 as their daily driver. Windows 95 was a big big thing but a lot of people waited out of choice or necessity. 4MB of RAM was hard to come by for a lot of computers.
My point is that while there is a small time window where Zip drives were available and Windows 3.11 was still the latest consumer Windows (ignoring NT here), Zip drives feel more like Windows 95-era. A stack of 3.5” floppy disks would have felt more authentic.
It's a very "borderline between eras" picture. The 1000 RSX was a late Tandy model. It has a 386 CPU and VGA graphics, which makes it a pretty reasonable Win 3.11 machine. It's a system that could technically run Win 95 but it'd struggle with that CPU and limited RAM capacity. You really wanted a 486 or Pentium for Win 95.
The monitor is the standard Tandy VGA monitor of the system's era. The styling on the speakers feel newer than the RSX's 1991 launch, they're more what I'd expect from the mid to late 90s.
You had to upgrade the VGA chip's BIOS to use Win 95 on it:
> The ACUMOS VGA graphics can be software-updated with Cirrus Logic BIOS (via MS-DOS driver) to allow VESA/SVGA to function in Windows 95, as the Windows 3.xx Tandy VGA drivers are insufficient for Windows 95.
ref: https://gunkies.org/wiki/Tandy_1000_R-Series
I think the background image is probably authentic, it has the feel of a mid-late 90s digital camera picture. It reads to me as the desk of someone who is trying to keep that system alive long past its prime years. Which were arguably over before they started, given 486 systems had been available for a bit when this launched. We end up with an early 90s system with a handful of mid-late 90s peripherals.
The bigger problem to me is this sounds like MIDI played back on a sound card with FM synthesis. The 1000 RSX had the poorly supported Tandy 3 tones + DAC sound hardware. You could install an AdLib, Sound Blaster, or other card to give it MIDI FM synth capability, but the base system can't do it. Alas, we can't see the back to see if it has such an upgrade...
I think the picture was taken using a film camera. The resolution is way too high for 90’s digital cameras.
As a data point/anecdote, I had a parallel-port Zip drive with a 386 and Windows 3.1. I remember quite clearly that I had to load a SCSI driver in CONFIG.SYS. I didn't understand back then why I had to load a SCSI driver for a parallel port device, years later I found out that the parallel port version was actually the SCSI version but it tunnelled the SCSI protocol via the parallel interface...
> was still the latest consumer Windows
When I was a kid, I was using Windows 95 for a while when Me was already a thing - newer versions could technically run, but the experience wasn't great on that hardware. You could even still find Windows 3.11 computers at my school at the time. Computers don't go die at the exact moment a successor becomes available on the market.
The Tandy 1000 RSX had a 386SX. The 386SX was a lower cost, 16-bit data bus version. Windows 95 minimum requirements were a 386DX (32-bit data bus) or better with a 486 recommended. Here's an excerpt from the comp.sys.tandy FAQ. If nothing else, read the second paragraph.
* III.C.1. Can I run Windows on my 1000?
...
The RLX's can run Windows 3.1 in standard mode only, if they have the RAM upgraded to 1M. The RLX just barely meets the minimum hardware require- ments for Windows 3.1, however, and performance will be poor. Windows will not recognize the built-in mouse (see section II.G.2.). One user says of Windows 3.1 on the 1000RLX:
Windows' performance is tolerable on a 486DX2/66. I like it on the RLX because I can start a program, go to the bathroom, and when I come back only have to wait a few minutes before I can actually use the #@$% thing.
The RSX's can run Windows 3.1 (or 3.11) in 386 enhanced mode if the memory has been upgraded to 2M or more. There is a Windows sound driver for the RSX's built-in sound at my ftp/WWW site and at Tandy's support WWW site (see sections IV.B.1. and IV.B.2.).
Tandy does not officially support the use of Windows on any model of the 1000-series. The RSX's could theoretically run Windows 95, but Microsoft does not recommend Win95 for 386's.
My personal favourite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV9BtuPpW9w.
These are 1992-era MIDI files that came bundled with MIDISoft Recording Session. Note that they contain both "Base" and "Extended" tracks in the same file, so there will be piano notes on channel 16 that are supposed to be percussion. A MIDI player such as Falcosoft Soundfont MIDI Player will detect those kinds of songs and automatically mute channel 16. (There is actually a way to mark channel 16 as a percussion channel, but the people who made those midis in 1992 didn't know about it)
I remember this media player from back in the day :)
Looking at it now, I love how they used a scroll bar as the UI widget to represent playback progress.
"You bolt awake on the NY subway. You are not online. It is 1987 AD. You are Judge Reinhold, and are an office worker in a comedy movie. The future cannot come to pass. Rome must burn."
Canyon.mid played using modern virtual instruments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfVobqrIymc
Canyon.mid played using modern real instruments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QN3ToFCv_s
the better one, clouds.mid - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TLtg4KfyL4
For some reason I don't understand, CSS filters sometimes make webpages completely unresponsive and unusable on my Librem 5.
"Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot." Super cool, YouTube.
Hopefully no one does this. Enabling them gets us further into this mess.
Problem is, I'm already signed in. I'm never NOT signed in. But for some reason playing video anywhere not started on YouTube.com now hits me with that garbage.
Now do Brian Orr's clouds.mid for Windows 95.
https://www.brianorr.com/blog/2010/01/14/windows-95-easter-e...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlUzgM6TiI4 I had forgotten this one. It's awesome.
What a wild ride we have taken with computing over the last 40 years. I’m 43 and my first computer looked even older than this - one color display, dual floppy disks and no hard drive. Now we have AI deploy to gigaclouds and monitor it with pocket computers.
Ahh ... retro. The many ways by which the past beckons us.
All right. Apropos the retro theme, here's a Web page dedicated to my Apple II program "Electric Duet": https://arachnoid.com/electric_duet/
The gory details: the Apple II had a simple TTL output connected to a speaker -- crude, not meant for music, and certainly not with two voices. Did this stop me? Read on.
I created an assembly-language player that switched the TTL speaker driver's output at 8 kilohertz, then created two musical voices by controlling the pulse width of the 8 KHz clock. So two voices, two notes at once, from a TTL driver.
Here's a sample of the music Electric Duet created, on an Apple II, in 1981: https://arachnoid.com/electric_duet/music_tracks/prelude.mp3 -- press the play button.
That's retro defined.
Some previous discussion in 2021:
I agree - to me, canyon.mid (while technically neat) has a very Corporate 1990's Advertisement sound and feel. Not surprising since, in a way, that's exactly what it is!
So that particular track never gelled with me.
I listened the heck out of some of the other included sound and MIDI sample material however, back then. As one did, with sources being so comparatively limited in the pre- and early- Web years.
Yes, I know it's just a "retro looking computer" to frame a YouTube video but...
I had to look up the Tandy 1000 RSX, because it seemed very wrong to have 16-color VGA graphics coming out of a computer labeled as "Tandy 1000".
Tandy 1000 RSX was the last model from 1991, and it had Super VGA rather than the famous "Tandy graphics" that originated with the IBM PCJr. It did not come with an Adlib or Sound Blaster card, which is what was depicted in the YouTube video. But the computer did have one ISA slot, and an Adlib or Sound Blaster compatible card could have been installed.
It also had a 386 processor rather than the 286 normally found on Tandy 1000 computers, and 1MB of RAM.