[HN Gopher] Canyon.mid
___________________________________________________________________
Canyon.mid
Author : LorenDB
Score : 200 points
Date : 2025-06-15 13:23 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (canyonmid.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (canyonmid.com)
| layer8 wrote:
| 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.
| MomsAVoxell wrote:
| I had a Zip drive before I had a Windows 95 PC.
| cluckindan wrote:
| The video shows Windows 3.11 though.
| layer8 wrote:
| 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.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| 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...
| cluckindan wrote:
| I think the picture was taken using a film camera. The
| resolution is way too high for 90's digital cameras.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| > 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.
| enneff wrote:
| CANYON.MID was shipped with Windows 3.1 IIRC.
| layer8 wrote:
| Yes, hence it predates the availability of Zip drives, which
| are more of a Windows 95-era thing.
| Dwedit wrote:
| Zip Drives began as Parallel Port devices, and PCs had parallel
| ports since the beginning. It's not like it's a USB device or
| something like that.
| layer8 wrote:
| I don't think that's a good counterargument. For example, an
| Olympus P-330 dye-sublimation photo printer from 1998 also
| uses a parallel port, but would nevertheless seem out of
| place for the Windows 3.11 era.
| MPSimmons wrote:
| 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.
| ksherlock wrote:
| 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.
| raydev wrote:
| Doesn't feel anachronistic for me, as people kept items from
| different eras on their desks in the 90s.
| mal10c wrote:
| This brought back a lot of memories!
| Disposal8433 wrote:
| 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.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| I can still perfectly hear the twang of the Monkey Island theme
| song on PC speaker, and vastly prefer it to generic MIDI
| renditions.
|
| My, where did the years go...
| p1mrx wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IOL4q5tDDQ
| pixelpoet wrote:
| Glorious!!! Even the channel name is too perfect :)
| RajT88 wrote:
| I went through a phase in high school of MIDI arrangements of
| songs I liked. Including crazy guitar solo music.
|
| Good times.
| sotix wrote:
| 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?
| badc0ffee wrote:
| 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?
| brudgers wrote:
| _There is no "correct" sound for a MIDI file_
|
| In the case of canyon.mid there is because it was composed
| for a specific midi instrument with a particular set of
| timbres.
|
| Or to put it another way, it's music and therefore
| complicated.
| pacifika wrote:
| MIDI files like this depend of the General MIDI
| standardized specification for electronic musical
| instruments.
| POSSIBLE_FACT wrote:
| "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.
| Sharlin wrote:
| And, of course, because it could play square waves, you
| could bitbang it to play digitized audio using PWM. Sounded
| terrible, and super CPU-heavy (so not useful in games), but
| still.
| brudgers wrote:
| Speakers (and rooms) have their own unique acoustical
| properties (e.g. distortion, frequency response, etc.). Also
| it matters where your ears are.
|
| Finally, "high fidelity" is not a synonym for "musical."
| vunderba wrote:
| 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.
| Sharlin wrote:
| MIDI in consumer use mostly went away once digitized sound
| became cheap enough. Though it's still very much there if
| you're composing or engraving music, for example with a
| program like MuseScore.
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| Well put!
|
| You may enjoy chiptunes. Wikipedia has samples:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiptune (see: Contemporary
| chiptune music)
| dist-epoch wrote:
| the better one, clouds.mid -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TLtg4KfyL4
| p1mrx wrote:
| I'm slightly impressed that the video (3.4 MB) is only 100 times
| larger than the original MIDI (33 kB)
| rtkwe wrote:
| That's probably mostly audio too given the vido is a 95% static
| screen. That has to encode to basically nothing.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| It's 2/3 audio and 1/3 video - 1.1MB.
|
| Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, most video codecs aren't
| tremendously efficient with static screens.
| jl6 wrote:
| The codec can be tuned to use a very long keyframe interval
| (e.g. ffmpeg's -g option), but whether that's worth the
| effort is another question.
| brudgers wrote:
| If you want Midi to render consistently across devices, you are
| "Significantly Out of Luck."
|
| The audio sounds like it sounds because Microsoft Licensed
| Roland's GS Wavetable. Without that you lose timbral
| information.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| That's not the Microsoft/Roland sound.
| brudgers wrote:
| Canyon.mid on my windows computer is.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| It sounds noticeably different in Windows Media Player.
| The video is probably using a Yamaha OPL chip, as found
| in Sound Blaster cards.
| brudgers wrote:
| The video is using audio because of variable Midi
| rendering.
|
| And any OPL is almost certainly emulated, not an actual
| chip.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| Yeah, this sounds like an OPL2 to me
| fishgoesblub wrote:
| 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.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| 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?
| api wrote:
| Apps shouldn't even have local volume controls. It's an OS
| function.
| weiliddat wrote:
| Well sometimes you want Spotify running at a lower volume
| than your 100 people Teams meeting, or maybe the other way
| around ;)
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| 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.
| echelon wrote:
| 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.
| murdockq wrote:
| Not affiliated at all but just came across and I wish this
| was built in to windows: https://github.com/File-New-
| Project/EarTrumpet
| alterom wrote:
| Yeah, because clicking out of the app to adjust its volume
| is _fun_!
|
| Clicks for the click God!
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| alterom wrote:
| Because the quality drop is imperceptible for most people,
| but the convenience of having volume controls _at the
| component that makes sound_ isn 't.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| 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.
| skrebbel wrote:
| 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.
| jdietrich wrote:
| 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....
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| 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.
| Dwedit wrote:
| 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.
| vikingerik wrote:
| 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.
| zkmon wrote:
| 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.
| echelon wrote:
| 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.
| whoisyc wrote:
| 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.
| bitlax wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8T5pyGiTPdE
| psychoslave wrote:
| 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.
| brudgers wrote:
| Youtube.
| entropie wrote:
| > Computers had enough gaming
|
| Had they? I gamed in the 90s and I game now. And boy, its not
| even remotely the same and iam thrilled to see what comes next
| (hello, gta6)
| reconnecting wrote:
| Simply because games these days are exactly designed to
| extract dopamine from people, and in the 90s they were mostly
| driven by pain.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| 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.
| throw10920 wrote:
| 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.
| brookst wrote:
| 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.
| pxc wrote:
| > 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.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| 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.
| gunalx wrote:
| Objectively music was less massproduced, equal low quality
| slop in earlier years.
| reconnecting wrote:
| 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.
| macintux wrote:
| 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.
| reconnecting wrote:
| 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.
| swat535 wrote:
| 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.
| pcwalton wrote:
| Your note taking app doesn't need AI, but it also doesn't
| need OLE, which represented an equally hot buzzword
| ("software componentry") of the 90s that Microsoft was
| trying to shoehorn into everything.
|
| Every generation has its hype cycle; it's nothing new.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Software crashed _all the time_ back then. Hitting
| control-S was one of those things you just did by habit so
| as to not lose too much work when it happened.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| 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.)
| browningstreet wrote:
| 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.
| cluckindan wrote:
| Gimp. On any system.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| GIMP takes pretty long to launch indeed, but it's still
| under 5 seconds on my 6yo XPS 13. Even on my Cortex-A53
| phone it doesn't reach 10 seconds.
| deathanatos wrote:
| GIMP takes ~2s to start on my 2016 Linux laptop.
|
| (Though I do think it takes significantly longer to start
| on my 2024 MBP...)
| spamizbad wrote:
| 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
| psychoslave wrote:
| 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.
| reconnecting wrote:
| 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.
| psychoslave wrote:
| What's an A round?
| deathanatos wrote:
| 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.)
| zkmon wrote:
| 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.
| grishka wrote:
| 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.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| 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
| kevingadd wrote:
| 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.
| b0a04gl wrote:
| 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.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| My personal favourite:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV9BtuPpW9w.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| That iframe really needs some CSS filters.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| For some reason I don't understand, CSS filters sometimes make
| webpages completely unresponsive and unusable on my Librem 5.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| If you're using Firefox, that'll be because it's limited to
| software rendering until etnaviv catches up with GLES3
| support.
| tgv wrote:
| 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.
| eminence32 wrote:
| 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.
| theletterf wrote:
| The creator of Canyon.mid, George Stone, was interviewed here:
| https://pixelatedaudio.com/canyon-mid/
| Boxxed wrote:
| Anyone have the other SoundBlaster era demo .MIDs at hand? I
| think there was...Self Control? rhythm.mid? A couple others that
| I can't remember?
| Dwedit wrote:
| 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)
|
| https://www.dwedit.org/files/session_midi.zip
|
| https://www.dwedit.org/files/session_midi_2.zip
| fortyseven wrote:
| "Sign in to confirm you're not a bot." Super cool, YouTube.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Hopefully no one does this. Enabling them gets us further into
| this mess.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Some previous discussion in 2021:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28779729
| lutusp wrote:
| 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.
| glimshe wrote:
| I didn't like canyon.mid back in the day. I'd much rather play
| popcorn or axelfoley!
| kelvie wrote:
| 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
| dleslie wrote:
| Yes, and sharing midi files was commonplace before mp3s took
| over. Mid and mod, what an era.
| tripflag wrote:
| mods are still alive, and crazier than ever -- proof that 4
| channels is all you need!
| https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/?file=ma-205456
| pjbk wrote:
| Now do Brian Orr's clouds.mid for Windows 95.
|
| https://www.brianorr.com/blog/2010/01/14/windows-95-easter-e...
| butz wrote:
| Remember the times when websites were able to play MIDI files?
| joe91 wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjWFNgKE4uw
| llimos wrote:
| Heard it in my head as soon as I saw the title on HN
| jonhohle wrote:
| I can hear that Model M just be looking at it. The break on the
| buckling springs is still one of the best you can get.
| ndiddy wrote:
| That's a Tandy lookalike of the Model M, it's a rubber dome
| keyboard.
| encoderer wrote:
| 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.
| pimlottc wrote:
| Get a load the big shot over here with two floppy drives! No
| mid-game disks changes for you!
| charlie0 wrote:
| Is that an iomega drive in the background!?
| erickhill wrote:
| Yes, indeed. Likely a parallel-port version unless that machine
| has a SCSI card.
| nice_byte wrote:
| Personally I prefer onestop.mid :)
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