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Amiga

Amiga/C64 Retro Radio Station 134

Posted by Hemos from the blast-from-the-past dept.
Hot Trout writes "24/7 Streaming Retro Radio bringing to you all those classic game and demo tunes from the 80's and 90's. Mainly C64 and Amiga but also games. This allows DSL users to enjoy their old school fav's in 128 kbps, 44Khz, STEREO. Very very cool ... Check it out at The old Computer @ Retro Radio." I've been reading High Score lately, so retro gaming is great to run through again.
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Amiga/C64 Retro Radio Station More

Amiga/C64 Retro Radio Station

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  • Kohina (Score:5, Informative)

    by staili ( 200478 ) <ville.vataja@gmail.com> on Wednesday September 11, 2002 @06:10AM (#4235745)
    Another good retro radio station is Kohina [kohina.com]

  • C64 audio (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wfmcwalter ( 124904 ) on Wednesday September 11, 2002 @06:12AM (#4235751) Homepage
    For anyone who's still interesting in those classic C64 tunes, Chris Abbott (and some other folks, I think) has remade a bunch of C64 tunes with modern equipment - I can strongly recommend his site [c64audio.com]

    • Phew, thank $deity that this news item didn't appear too much sooner. Just last weekend I ordered three records from Chris's site. Lucky me, I have all the chances of actually getting what I wanted. I quite expect his stock to drop to zero after you mentioned c64audio.com in here.

      The shopping cart system c64audio.com runs, uses some nasty IE-specific javascript tricks. It won't display correctly (or virtually at all) on Mozilla or Opera. Being a linux user, this was somewhat problematic. When I mailed about this, Chris was very responsive and helpful. He told me to disable javascript entirely and go directly to this page [c64audio.com] in order to see what his shop has to offer. After a little education about PGP and link-hunting, I was also able to send him my credit-card details and my order encrypted. Yes, GPG is all fine and good (I use it), but it still lacks a solid, out-of-the-box integration to w32 mail clients. As I understand it, Chris is a computer-literate person but not a techie.

      Incidentally, if anyone happens to know a nice free software shopping-cart system that runs on IIS and can access and use Worldpay's [worldpay.com] brokerage system, Chris would love to know about it. I tried to find one, but it seems very few shopping cart packages actually interface with Worldpay. It would be so good to get c64audio.com usable and accessible to all users. As the situation stands at the moment, that functionality bug may cost Chris quite a many customers. Given the selection of retro spirited records there is rather impressive, it's a shame.

  • The faux Indiana Jones themesong from the Amiga 500 classic still haunts me late at night...
    • You do have the chance to once again experience frustration in the shape of digital "entertainment" thanks to

      XRick [bigorno.net]

      Now if you'd rather give your gameboy advance a severe bashing after stepping into one of those 'less-than-obvious' spike traps for the n'teenth time (if you have a flash-linker of course)

      Rick Dangerous Advance [spoutnickteam.com]

      You will be able to and hopefully soon.

      • Rick Dangerous 2 was the ultimate frustration for me. I'm also extremely surprised that anyone else shares this sort of enthusiasm for the old game. Now, if you liked/had a ROM of Switchblade 2, you would be my new messiah.

      • Rick Dangerous songs from Amiga on UNIX. (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        You can obtain amiga songs of Rick Dangerous 1 and 2 from these urls:

        http://hangar18.campus.luth.se/exotica/tunes/arc hi ve/CUST-Custom/RickDangerous.lha
        http://hangar18. campus.luth.se/exotica/tunes/archi ve/BD-BenDaglish/BD.Rick_Dangerous_2.lha

        You can play them with uade: http://www.ee.tut.fi/~heikki/uade.html

  • UADE plays most Amiga music formats (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If you are interested in listening to old amiga retro songs on UNIX you can use UADE (Unix Amiga Delitracker Emulator).

    http://www.ee.tut.fi/~heikki/uade.html

    UADE plays approximately 150 sound formats (mod variants, future composer, hippel, brian's sound monitor,david whittaker etc..)

    You can obtain songs from Exotica
    http://hangar18.campus.luth.se/exotica/

    Oh btw. UADE is Free / Open Source Software.

  • 128kbps 44KHz stereo (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Zakabog ( 603757 )
    Why? With a 128kbps stream, 3 seconds of audio is larger than most of the games on the C64 and amiga. There's no vocals, complicated guitar riffs, anything else that would need high bitrates, alot of beeps and different pitches, why would you need 128kbps 44KHz stereo?
    • Although very cool, this does seem like a waste of bandwidth (yes I'm a hypocrite listening to it right now). You can just download a c64 "sid" player here [google.com] and grab a load of tunes here [lemon64.com]. You can even play these sid files in winamp using SidAmp [labyrinth.net.au]. Enjoy

    • Re:128kbps 44KHz stereo (Score:5, Interesting)

      by hrm ( 26016 ) on Wednesday September 11, 2002 @06:42AM (#4235823)
      If you're not emulating the C64 SID chip, you'll need a fairly high-bit (just as high as for "normal" music) mp3 stream to properly reproduce the audio.

      The SID chip didn't just beep at different pitches, it was a digital/analog synthesizer on a single chip.

      When BYTE magazine compiled a list of the 20 most memorable microchips ever, the SID chip was in there. At the time, it was way ahead of every other sound producing silicon found in home computers. Some considered the Commodore Amiga's fully digital synthesizer chips a step back.
  • Don't worry, Roy and Elvis are not only working on a new Amiga and Amiga OS, but also a load of crazy new games and demos with some cool and groovy rock and roll tunes, daddy-o! :-)
  • Never heard of it, but the stream looks like a normal Shoutcast/Icecast stream and xmms [xmms.org] likes it.

    Now if they only started to play Arkanoid... :-)
  • I enjoyed all those great tunes on the 8 and 16 bit micros back in the day and I can see why someone would download emulators and get the songs to play whenever they want. Hell, I'd even nearly sort of sympathise with someone who made a cd for the car.

    However I don't see the point of a radio station playing these tunes.

    Actually, oops, shoot me, I've figured out a valid reason while typing this: so you can hear songs you've never heard before that you didn't know you liked. In fact I suppose this is the point of all radio stations compared to buying cds (or however you acquire music).

    God I'm such a dumbass. Anyway I do have a cold so that's my excuse. Woozy in da head!

    graspee

  • Since I'm not affiliated with the group [machinaesupremacy.com] I can plug them. c64-inspired rock is my own description. They have ~130MByte of music available for download. I know that most of my friends who were into c64 music also dig these guys.

    Get the vorbises, not the mp3s.

    • Yep, their playing and sounds really appeal to retroists :) I even made an audio CD out of the vorbises, so I would have something different to listen to while driving. Evidently, my girlfriend's little brother fell in love in the music when she was visiting her family back home - and asked if he could keep the CD. Well, I can always burn a new one. At the same time, I might have given the band some new listeners. Her brother will, undoubtedly, play that cd to his friends...

      Their appearance on this year's Assembly was one of the reasons I organized myself a ticket there. Sure, when live, they play louder and much more aggressively than on those downloadable versions but it was a nice gig no matter what. Too bad their vocalist put too much force in his performance after the (second of third) encore that he snapped a string from his electric guitar. I never got to hear Anthem Apocalyptica live :(

  • If you are interested in listening to old amiga retro songs on UNIX you can use UADE (Unix Amiga Delitracker Emulator).

    http://www.ee.tut.fi/~heikki/uade.html

    UADE plays more than 150 sound formats (mod variants, future composer, hippel, brian's sound monitor,david whittaker etc..)

    You can obtain songs from Exotica
    http://hangar18.campus.luth.se/exotica/

  • Amiga! ST! (really OctaMED and Bars'n'Pipes) (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ST!

    Amiga!

    ST!

    etc.

    Seriously though, the Amiga was _much_ better for music than the ST - musicians often fell for the false economy of the ST with it's built in (crappy) midi port, but a midi card for the amiga always provided better much midi anyway, and Amiga Tracker packages, particularly OctaMED SoundStudio [octamed.co.uk] (now available for Windows*), really completely outclassed ST tracker packages. And Amiga Bars'n'Pipes [amigau.com] is still unmatched.

    What happened to Bars'n'Pipes? Microsoft bought it, and promptly stopped all development! However, they weren't totally evil: You can still get a (binary-only, no source) copy today from the previous link.

    Bars'n'Pipes had a fascinating and extremely powerful UI, where one composed by plumbing components together. Some newer audio packages attempt a similar metaphor, but bar'n'pipes did it better (and in 198x too!). Please, if you're a GUI sound application author, take the time to get Bars'n'pipes up and running on an Amiga Emulator.

    * And I know they have an unstable Linux build of OctaMED they're not releasing yet... (mainly because the OSS-lite sound system that's the default in Linux 2.4.x totally sucks, and they don't think the market's big enough if they require ALSA)
    • Seriously though, the Amiga was _much_ better for music than the ST - musicians often fell for the false economy of the ST with it's built in (crappy) midi port...

      Er...no. For soundtracker and computer-based music, there's no argument. The Amiga destroyed the ST (and I was an ST owner).

      For pro MIDI-work however, the Amiga never really got a look in. The availability of Cubase on the ST, and the high-res (for the time) mono monitor made for a superb production environment.

      Cheers,
      Ian

    • Actually, MS did eventually release the source for Bars'n'Pipes, and it has undergone many modernising improvements since.

      Have a look. [amiga.org]

  • I use UADE. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    http://www.ee.tut.fi/~heikki/uade.html

    uade supports lots of different amiga formats on unix variants (they claim more than 100 formats).

  • There is even an MSX [msx.org] radio channel [live365.com].

  • Nectarine (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Wednesday September 11, 2002 @06:44AM (#4235827) Journal
    I'm personally a big fan of the Nectarine [scenemusic.net]. Broadcasting music from the demo scene of the 80's and 90's. Timeless Amiga and C64 music such as Second Reality, Nine Fingers, Deadlock, Desert Dreams, and much more. You need this site if ever having owned an Amiga/C64, especially if you had lots of MODs that were lost when switching to PC or was into demos. Check out the Top 50 requested music [scenemusic.net] yourself and let Winamp enjoy playing some excellent retro MOD/S3M music!

    I hope that site never dies, and likely it won't since the material they play is either copyright free or played with the author's permission. So it's a free station playing free music.
  • I remember recording Commedore64 programs from the radio... which was fun.

    Press record on tape _now_ - and after a few minutes of noise you had a program on tape.

    It even worked :)
    • I wonder what would happen if there was an active RIAA back then. Ban radio tranmissions since they're in violation of the DMCA, as they can be used to circumvent copy protection!
    • Heh, that reminds me of Basicode.

      On the dutch radio between 1980 and 1985 there was the computer/science/space program Hobbyscoop and they always had a newsletter in Basic. This was at the time that every computer was different (Z80-based, 6800-based, 8080-based etc etc), with all different kinds of Basics with all different kind of ways to do things (for example, clear the screen, on the MSX it was CLS, on the Philips P2000T is was print chr$(12)). To overcome this problem they has a set of basic-subroutines. For example if you did "gosub 100", you cleared the screen. If you did "gosub 110", you would go to position (x%,y%) on the screen etc. This way the one basic program could be ran on all home-computers at that time.

      Every wednesday evening between 19:25 and 19:30 the newsletter was send and it was just like playing an data-tape on your cassettedeck. I taped it and later on with a simple three resistor circuit played it on the printerport of the P2000 and I could read my weekly news about space and the MIR, interesting things regarding computers or if programs were send I could calculate when the next lunar eclipse was or when the next full moon would be etc etc etc.

      Oh euh.. Rocketscience? Not really. But it was the beginning of the 80s, when home-computers started to become popular and the reign of the IBM PC hadn't started yet... Way cool stuff :-)

  • No Alambik needed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by YeeHaW_Jelte ( 451855 ) on Wednesday September 11, 2002 @06:52AM (#4235842) Homepage
    I dunno why Retro Radio insists on using Alambik, probably some commercial reason, because the stream is just mp3's
    at http://nectarine.ipsyn.net:8002.
    Alambik seems to be Internet Explorer/ Windows only.

  • Credits to Machinae Supremacy [machinaesupremacy.com] for using the Ogg Vorbis [xiph.org] format to release free retro music and remixes! (and of course for being swedes like me ;) )

    Awesome Gianna Sisters Remix [machinaesupremacy.com]
    (you know -- that Super Mario clone for Amiga)

    Sidology Episode I - Sid Evolution [machinaesupremacy.com]
    (mix of great ogged C64 SID [google.com] music)

    Sidology Episode III - Apex Ultima [machinaesupremacy.com]
    (more of the same!)
    • > (you know -- that Super Mario clone for Amiga)

      no. giana sisters made their debut on the C64 and were the _prototype_ of super mario bros. once you've played both original versions (on the C64 and NES respectively), it becomes obvious that super mario bros. is a shameless rip-off.
      • Actually Gianna Sisters (by Rainbow Arts) was published for C64 *after* Mario Bros (by Nintendo), and it can't be a prototype as it was from a different company (and for a different hardware).

        As a side note, Nintendo quickly sued Rainbow Arts for imitating their concept, and Gianna Sisters boxes were taken off the shelves. Thus it is hard to find an original copy, and most of us who has played Gianna Sisters has played a pirated version. It is strange that a game that never sold more than a few hundred copies became that popular.
    • Sort of on-topic: I noticed that some (if not all) of the music compo entries at Assembly this year were released in Ogg format. Kudos! Now all I need is support for Ogg in iTunes for my TiBook.
  • Try this [emucamp.com] demo with UAE or Fellow emulators! Some really great tunes from the legendary DEATHSTAR group.
  • I know, I know.. Windows program..
    DeliPlayer, a native MOD, C64 and custom Amiga tunes player for Win32.
    Thought I'd post the address for it seeing that i use it sometimes when I get nostalgic..

    URL is: http://www.deliplayer.com [deliplayer.com]

    Maybe useful to those people out there that want to listen to the music from classic Psygnosis games or other custom music formats (195 formats supported including common PC trackers).


    Jim.

  • Waste of bandwidth (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Get 18000 C64 songs in the transfer volume of 30 minutes 128kBit/s internet radio: The High Voltage SID collection [freeuk.com].

  • Swinth (Score:2)

    by Micah ( 278 )
    Anyone remember Swinth and Swinth II on the C64? Produced awesome music and cool laser effects.

    I have VICE installed on my Linux box, but last time I tried I couldn't find disk images for it.

    I still have my stack of Commodore disks and my C64 and 1541 disk drive, but haven't bothered to look for the cable to connect it to my PC and get the disk images on my Linux box. If I did that I could finally dump the 64.... VICE really does work great.
    • If anyone finds or has this program, please email me! I've had one of those songs running through my head from the moment I downloaded VICE (and Forbidden Forest :) a few weeks ago.
    • Yup...good old Swynth. Used to zone out on it for 20-30 minutes ata time. IIRC, it was a combination of two other programs: Swish and Synth Sample (thus the spelling of the name). I've not heard it in fifteen years and can still close my eyes, see the lines, and hear the music. Google doesn't turn up anything useful; anyone got a copy somewhere?
  • In Sweden there is a public radio show called syntax Error that plays Scene, Retro, Game and console music every thurstay at 20:30.

    For more information and to download the episodes checkout:

    http://www.syntaxerror.nu [syntaxerror.nu]
    http://www.ko2000.nu/syntaxerror/ [ko2000.nu]
    http://www.sr.se/p3/frank/syntax.stm [www.sr.se]

    /Fredrik
  • then check out these:

    High Voltage SID Collection [c64.org] which contains about 20.000 sid tunes, downloadable as a 32 mb file (seems to be down right now)

    Exotica [exotica.fix.no], lots and lots of vintage Amiga game music and suitable players for download (and check that lovely Team17 logo on their frontpage).

  • Rob Hubbard a go-go.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mccalli ( 323026 ) on Wednesday September 11, 2002 @07:13AM (#4235895) Homepage
    I can't be the only one who doesn't understand why Rob Hubbard was writing computer game music.

    He should have been in a band. A good band. A brilliant band. I would still love to hear One Man and His Droid played by a rock band that knows its stuff...

    Cheers,
    Ian

    • Would this be the same Rob Hubbard from dearrob.mod ? I never heard any of his music (AFAIK), but this song is still one of my favorites. Used to listen to it with DMP (shut up!) but now am relegated to the wimpy xmms. If only there was Scream Tracker for linux :-(.

      (Actually, at first, I thought you meant Ron Hubbard and was quite surprised to see anyone saying anything good about him here.)
      • Would this be the same Rob Hubbard from dearrob.mod ? I never heard any of his music (AFAIK)

        Not come across that one - at work right now but I'll download tonight and have a listen.

        Chances are very strong, though, that the answer is "yes it is the same person". If you've done any C64 gaming, chances are you'll have heard at least something by him.

        To find out more about Rob and what he wrote, go to The Complete Works of Rob Hubbard [freenetpages.co.uk], where there are interviews and downloads. If you've not heard him before, try at least One Man and his Droid, Sanxion, Master of Magic and Commando. Probably International Karate too.

        Cheers,
        Ian

    • C64 music played live (Score:2, Interesting)

      by RasmusW ( 56000 )
      Well there actually is a danish band playing C64 music on real instruments:

      www.pressplayontape.com [pressplayontape.com]

      I just love their version of Warhawk =)

      -Raz
      • There is a German independent (wave) formation called "Welle: Erdball" (word-for-word translation: Wave: Earthball). They state in their CD booklets that all sounds and effects are directly from a C-64. They even sometimes list the Commodore C-64 as a band member :-) And they make some damn good wave, I tell ya :-)

        Here is their homepage [welle-e.de], they even have an excellent section dedicated to the C-64 [welle-e.de] with lots of infos, how and what types of the C-64 they use, what types of C-64 exist, etc. :-) Worth a look.
  • virt [vgmix.com] just relased his chip tune disk fx 2.0 [mono211.com] on monotonik [mono211.com]. the professional game musician, who made the soundtracks of several games on the nintendo platform, re-scored 15-year-old nintendo titles from konami, as if he were actually soundtracking them at the time. you can download them there [mono211.com] for beer [c2.com] -- and have a look at that great cover [mono211.com]!
  • As soon as Amiga is mentioned we get a bunch of uneducated morons running around insulting everyone or just beging pains.<br>
    <br>
    A radio station like this is what slashdot is to most ppl, a collection of info/news/music that we might not know about. Saying, "Just download this and that" is like saying "Why read slashdot when you can read the other newspapers".<br>
    <br>
    Why rack down on something that is good, do some research, check the facts, then come back.<br>
    <br>
    And as i told someone before, This Retro radio is just a relay of Nectarine Radio (url avail in the top comments).<br>
  • The post is a bit misleading... The online radio in question actually is Nectarine, the stream is just played through an online player hosted at theoldcomputer.com. See the Nectarine home page athttp://scenemusic.net/ for more information and stream URLs.
  • I've named 8000 of them so far -- can anyone beat that? :)
  • We have a radioshow here in sweden that plays only this kind of music. I listen to it every time and now with this avaliable i can totally scrap my mp3 collection of Britney Spears!

  • I gave it a listen for half an hour, reliving happy times with Sonic and Mario. Then I got a "your machine is low on virtual memory" warning.

    Turns out the Alambik player had consumed 78MB, rising by about 25Kb/second. To descibe it as "leaky" would be an injustice all household objects full of holes.

    Use at your peril!


  • The Amiga's sound system was 4-channel (2L, 2R) 22kHz, 8-bit, right?

    So why is the mp3 stream being broadcast in 128 kbps, 44kHz, 16-bit fidelity?
  • What do we have here? A bunch of MOD and SID tunes, being converted to a stream, and then pushed out over the internet.

    Why can't they just 'stream' me the MOD or SID and let me play it with something on my local system? It would substantially reduce bandwidth use.

    • It turns out that they don't only support C64 and Amiga tunes, but also Atari, MSX, Nintendo, etc. I suppose it would be a little difficult maintaining a player that supports all of these different formats and their correct (!) emulation.

      As I understand it, it's difficult enough to write a player for all the different Soundtracker formats, e.g. MOD/S3M/XM/OCT/... The MP3 format just ensures that the music gets played as intended.

      Gunnar

      • The only difficulty I've seen with trackers is that none of them that I can find these days play Protracker mods right. The last player I had which did it properly (besides MED) was Intuitracker, AKA Buggy POS, on AmigaDOS.

        Apparently Protracker has both the usual speed command found in mods and a tempo command. If you change the tempo it remembers the previous tempo, and if you set tempo to '0' it's supposed to return to the previous tempo.

        Instead, almost every tracker treats tempo as an alias to speed and when you set tempo to '0' it starts playing at speed 0, not the previous tempo.

        Regardless winamp (and probably xmms) will play NT/PT/FT/XM/S3M/MED/OktaMED, with the caveat that they screw up PT. You can see this effect on the classic MOD "Klisje Paa Klisje" which is a demotune from Cryptoburners.

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