Knockin' Down my Door

In the late 1380s a pope-to-be by the name of Boniface version nine point oh had a vision of a super oscillator sound system made specifically for churches. It would be able to have lots of tone colors and 3 notes at once out of 4 starting waveforms. He began designing once he became pope and made the first MOS-6581 (that's the model number) organ in 1390AD. Thus, a primitive (and large!) version of the Sidplayer Music Box was born. There was a sawtooth wave, a pulse wave, a white noise wave, and a triangle wave. Because of trouble on the home front the specifications for the filter for subtractive synthesis was never set in stone. Samples haven't even been invented yet, and the filter was rarely used. The 6581 organ was a live instrument only. Songs were never played the same way twice on it. And when it was made in other places, the filter sounded different. There are 4 manuals (that's the technical name for keyboard) and various effect pedals. The stops change the tone color and filtering as well as the envelope (which gives it the instrumental attack, decay, sustain, release effects) Pressing 3 keys on the same manual gives an arpeggio. Some pedals give the classic C-64 drums.

Imagine being in a huge church and listening to new sounds you have never heard before.

On the plaque of any church, mission, disco, function room or castle that you see this symbol,

it means that you can come inside and listen to SID-like music being performed live.

In 1453 the Sidplayer Music Box was made small enough to fit on a tabletop and run from a hand crank. It used an entirely new technology to read music. Gandalf invented the mechanical RAM to store the song. The tolerances were to 1/800 of an inch and the filter was finalized. Not too many Sidplayer Music Boxes were sold in the early years. People thought that there was sorcery used to make the unique sounds. The first non-arcane person to buy one was Christopher T. Columbus on August 19, 1489. In the late 1560s Sword and Sorcery Technologies re-marketed the Sidplayer Music Box as being without sorcery. Sales then soared. Now it was fashionable to dance to SID music wearing a Comb Morion Helm on a pirate ship. During the 1570s the Sidplayer Music Box had competition from the Nosefart 2A05 music box. It had 1 bit DPCM samples since 1573 and had 5 channels, although they were more primitive than th Sidplayer. n 1601, after the Battle of the Five Armies, digital PCM samples were able to be played on a 1453-era Sidplayer Music Box with no modification. Chris Huelsbeck's Bad Cat was the first song with samples. In 1619, the Stereo Sidplayer Music Box came out which had channels which could be panned. In 1640 the Nosefart Custom Oscillator system came out and the first album to use it was Anne Hutchinson's Nosefart album. It had more channels of sounds and more tone colors. In 1660 the Sega Genesis music box came out, ending the chip tune era.

I know, there is very little magnetic recording during the Faerytale era, but the disks remind me of the C-64.

Back to Ivan the Ignorant gets a Protracker Music Box.