New DIY dongle helps demoscene devotees, chiptune aficionados, and retrogaming enthusiasts recreate authentic 8-bit sounds on a budget
“Why buy an ordinary sound sampler — when you can buy a recording studio?” asked a 1991 advert for the New Dimensions TechnoSound Turbo — a marvelous piece of kit which transformed the already extremely capable Amiga into a near-pro-level audio workstation. While the “revolutionary” notion of owning your own sampler for 35 quid vs. paying £100s for professional studio time — or £1000s for an Akai S1000 — may seem quaint in 2020, when everyone has access to a vastly more capable “studio” in the form of their mobile phone, demoscene devotees, chiptune aficionados, and retrogaming enthusiasts still clamor for authentic 8-bit sounds and the gear required to produce them.
There was a magic moment for a few years around the end of the 1980s, when home computers were better than professional ones. That’s a mighty grand pronouncement, but it refers to the crop of 16-bit home computers that genuinely were far better than nearly all PCs at the time for multimedia tasks. You could plug a sampler cartridge into your Amiga and be in the dance charts in no time, something which sparked a boom in electronic music creativity. As retrocomputing interest has soared so have the prices of old hardware, and for those still making Amiga music that cart can now be outrageously expensive. it’s something [echolevel] has addressed, with an open-source recreation of an Amiga sampler.
An Amiga 500, Stereo Master and handful of $1 records from a 1990 Sunday market: Can we make a dance track on a budget home computer? Of course! Back when big-name dance tunes required big-budget-gear, a secondhand Amiga let you take the first steps to making a dance-floor banger.
Warhol was undeniably enthusiastic about digital art, but Haring felt the strongest affinity with the new medium. He integrated the Amiga computer into his work much more and drew these five digital images which will be offered in this sale as NFTs.
The Commodore 64 has been pulled apart, reverse engineered, replicated, and improved upon to no end over the last four decades or so. The Amiga 500 has had less attention, in part due to its greater level of sophistication. However, you can now order a brand-new Amiga-compatible PCB if you’re looking to put together a machine from surplus parts. The design is known as Denise, and is apparently the work of an anonymous Swedish designer according to the Tindie listing….
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7 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Open Amiga Sampler Cart Brings Inexpensive 8-Bit Audio Sampling Back to the Masses
https://www.hackster.io/news/the-open-amiga-sampler-cart-brings-inexpensive-8-bit-audio-sampling-back-to-the-masses-8163771136bf
New DIY dongle helps demoscene devotees, chiptune aficionados, and retrogaming enthusiasts recreate authentic 8-bit sounds on a budget
“Why buy an ordinary sound sampler — when you can buy a recording studio?” asked a 1991 advert for the New Dimensions TechnoSound Turbo — a marvelous piece of kit which transformed the already extremely capable Amiga into a near-pro-level audio workstation. While the “revolutionary” notion of owning your own sampler for 35 quid vs. paying £100s for professional studio time — or £1000s for an Akai S1000 — may seem quaint in 2020, when everyone has access to a vastly more capable “studio” in the form of their mobile phone, demoscene devotees, chiptune aficionados, and retrogaming enthusiasts still clamor for authentic 8-bit sounds and the gear required to produce them.
Tomi Engdahl says:
An Amiga Sampler 30 Years Later
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/08/an-amiga-sampler-30-years-later/
There was a magic moment for a few years around the end of the 1980s, when home computers were better than professional ones. That’s a mighty grand pronouncement, but it refers to the crop of 16-bit home computers that genuinely were far better than nearly all PCs at the time for multimedia tasks. You could plug a sampler cartridge into your Amiga and be in the dance charts in no time, something which sparked a boom in electronic music creativity. As retrocomputing interest has soared so have the prices of old hardware, and for those still making Amiga music that cart can now be outrageously expensive. it’s something [echolevel] has addressed, with an open-source recreation of an Amiga sampler.
OPEN AMIGA SAMPLER
https://github.com/echolevel/open-amiga-sampler
Open source schematics, parts lists and documentation for building a generic 8bit/mono Amiga sampler cartridge
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amiga HDMI with a Raspberry Pi! (RGBtoHDMI)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8brkYFoO9I
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amiga Samplers : Budget dance music in 1990
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9MXYZh1jcs
An Amiga 500, Stereo Master and handful of $1 records from a 1990 Sunday market: Can we make a dance track on a budget home computer? Of course! Back when big-name dance tunes required big-budget-gear, a secondhand Amiga let you take the first steps to making a dance-floor banger.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Discover how Keith Haring used an Amiga computer to push the boundaries of art in the 1980s
https://www.christies.com/features/keith-haring-digital-drawings-12857-3.aspx?fbclid=IwAR39JhxCyXrwcY7ZfqhL6lsHzIoMjvLcUAFrNcAWd7auzTf1kI-J8erisXw
Warhol was undeniably enthusiastic about digital art, but Haring felt the strongest affinity with the new medium. He integrated the Amiga computer into his work much more and drew these five digital images which will be offered in this sale as NFTs.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Commodore 64 has been pulled apart, reverse engineered, replicated, and improved upon to no end over the last four decades or so. The Amiga 500 has had less attention, in part due to its greater level of sophistication. However, you can now order a brand-new Amiga-compatible PCB if you’re looking to put together a machine from surplus parts. The design is known as Denise, and is apparently the work of an anonymous Swedish designer according to the Tindie listing….
https://hackaday.com/2023/10/19/you-can-now-order-a-brand-new-amiga-pcb/?fbclid=IwAR2-E0bM-bTw8pYDj_lsRtqXzMp1Py3t5w0oUgV6cNd9376wEdc3Yb2Wgo0
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://filmstories.co.uk/gaming/a-full-size-commodore-amiga-retro-console-is-on-the-way/?fbclid=IwAR02Ms7CI4hi9XNyV7Gl5XCP7xAYe9Kc7hVmZt_n1oi9fw3hFi-mDVr-GZ0