A Vintage 16K Music Demo (William Tell Overture)

This was made by Garry and Linda Howard in 1982. There was a 32K version... but... The code was published in a magazine and the terms of use were to type it in and save it on a tape and then run it as is, which is what I did, having to push either 30000 or 60000 keys, I only had 16K so I typed in that version. The longer version had the less interesting part of this melody.

Before it plays you can hear what the program data sounds like on the tape as it reads almost 16K of data from the tape at about 1200 baud.

It's not a copyright violation to run it and show it to people as it is, because that is what it is for.

I can describe the USUAL musical sounds from this machine as sounding very much like the buzzer on a game show when someone gives a wrong answer. This program probably made the best sounding music ever with the TRS-80, and I show it to you because it's on an 8-bit 16K machine with usually crappy sound, like my 1985 synthesizer disk for the Apple II, and it's a historic demo that was famous with people who had TRS-80's but is almost forgotten now.

And also it is either evidence or proof of concept of getting a lot of high quality sound or music without much memory, certainly much less than an MP3 of it would need.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• TRS-80
• early
• sound
• music
• demo
• William
• Tell
• Overture
• CoCo
• Color
• Computer

[mariobrasil9]

thats not william tell overture, william tell overture is more animated

[MrJdiffend]

Start at the 3:00 mark if you want to go right to the music.

[popper18]

This sounds nearly identical to my TRS-80 model one William Tell demo.

[summer20105707]

It sounds just like an organ. It would be great in a hockey arena.

[TheSmokeRingdotCom]

I am Garry. That was me that made the William Tell program. It won first place in the Color Computer News magazine programming contest. It's cool to find this video. Did you really have to record the sound of the tape loading, though? :-)

[livefree75]

Ah yes the doo-dweet, doo-dwaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh we heard hundreds if not thousands of times, loading up PacTac or Zaxxon or something. :) Good times.

[fiveminutewalk]

Man, I wish I still had my TRS-80 and tape drive... Maybe I'll pick one up off eBay. Thanks for posting this great video. Takes me back! ;-)

[owlfood]

i remember library books and magazines that had programs you could type in and play games or music with back then. good memories :)