Music for a Dead Computer

Every PC of the era had a voice, and no two sounded alike. The same game could play a lush orchestra on one card, a buzzing FM organ on the next, and a desperate string of beeps on a machine with nothing in its ISA slots. Part of the fun was never knowing which.

LOST BUILDS keeps that lottery alive. Press F7 and the MUSIC window opens: a resident MIDI player that stays loaded while you browse, read and play. Close the window and the music goes on, with a small now-playing line in the menu bar to prove it.

Five cards, one song

Under [ DEVICE ] the player offers five sound devices. Each one is a different bank of instruments behind the same General MIDI notes, so any track can be heard five ways.

GM WAVETABLE is the default: a full wavetable set, the closest thing to the composer's intent.
ISA WAVETABLE is the budget card. Same idea, 8-bit samples at 11 kHz, a little grit in every note.
FM SYNTH swaps the samples for two-operator FM-style patches, the sound a great many DOS machines actually made.
CHIP SYNTH has pulse, triangle, saw and noise, and nothing else.
PC SPEAKER is one bit. Its own spec line asks: WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS?

Seven tracks

The built-in soundtrack is seven original MIDI compositions, written for the archive, not transcribed from anything.

*After Midnight* is the BBS at 2 a.m.: electric piano, a warm pad, a modem light blinking somewhere.
*Connect 14400* is a shareware intro in a hurry, all pumping octaves and tracker arpeggios.
*Disk 3 of 3* is the last floppy in the box, music box and vibraphone, fragile as the disk.

The four newer tracks push further into the dark.

*Steel Pursuit* is a cold machine chase: a relentless synth-bass pulse, brass stabs on the off-beat and a four-bar break where everything nearly stops. Put it on before a round of IRON ASH 2031.
*Ashes on the Wire* has no beat at all. Low wind, string drones that slide into a tritone, a few isolated bells. It is less a song than an empty city after dark.
*Shareware Violence* is the opposite: 168 BPM of palm-muted gallops, a minute and a half of the kind of metal that came on disk one of a shooter demo.
*Alien Payback* slows down and swaggers. Industrial, heavy and very pleased with itself.

Seven tracks. Five sound devices. Absolutely no guarantee your neighbors will appreciate the PC speaker.

Try Shareware Violence on GM WAVETABLE, then on FM SYNTH, then on PC SPEAKER. The tune is the same. The decade is not.

Bring your own

[ LOAD MIDI ] opens a .mid file from your own disk and plays it through the same player and the same five devices. The file is read in the browser and goes nowhere else. Every issue also has a theme of its own in the ISSUE THEMES group; this one is called Dead Air.