Before it was called "chiptune", we called it "music" because it was the way you made music on computers for games and demos. It wasn't a choice so much as a necessity due to limitations in 80s hardware.
Sure, soundtrackers using samples were starting to pop up but more so on the Commodore Amiga than the Atari ST, the latter not being able to do much else while its 8MHz CPU was tied up real-time mixing four channels of samples. (The Amiga had dedicated hardware.) At some point, we started calling it blip-blop to distinguish it from the growing sample tracker movement (and digidrum, which blended native YM2149 sounds with sampled drums as a performance/soundscape compromise).
This medley contains my five surviving blip-blop tunes from that era (when I went by 7an of Sync), as played back by the three-channel YM2149 sound chip. It heavily features the "envelope bass", a brutal beast of a sound that might be considered the Atari ST's most distinguishing one. It's a sound that was only invented toward the end of the ST's natural life. (You might say that the mighty 16-bit home computer is currently on extended life-support administered by a fanatic group of nostalgics, and I thank them for that.)
I did some mild mastering work on this medley and I think you'll enjoy the sound quality even (especially?) when you crank it up. You'll have to forgive the elementary melodies and chord progressions; I was 17 and couldn't write a hook to save my life. :)
You may download and share this song freely with your friends. You may also use it in your own non-commercial works provided you follow the instructions in the Creative Commons license below.
Copyright (C) 2015 Juan Irming - Some Rights Reserved - Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
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