The Spectrum, along with the C64, NES, SNES, etc is still on my to-do list of catching up with computing/gaming history by devving some games for the platforms that started it all ;")
This massively understates what you could do with the basic 1-bit arrangement. People managed to get music playing during gameplay (I think Manic Miner was first) and even managed to play music with two channels and percussion (Robin of the Wood IIRC).
I wrote a few games on the Spectrum and as with most of its hardware limitations we managed to squeeze quite a lot out of it.
My memory is very hazy, it was well over 40 years ago, but I think keeping the timing under control was was one a big hurdle. Because it was single threaded and there was effectively only one interrupt, screen refresh/flyback, so you had to intersperse the music code into the main code and juggle it to even out the note timing.
I remember one game I wrote for the 16K Spectrum, and thanks to an incredibly clever & musical friend we got something like 30 seconds of a tune that had a passable resemblance to Bach's Toccata in about 20 -30 bytes of code.[1]. Every last byte mattered on that machine.
[1] Not 100% on the details but it was about that. We used a combination of base notes and mathematical progression rather than just playing a score as we could get that smaller. I think I've a dot-matrix printout of the games source code somewhere, assuming the ink hasn't faded.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 17.7 ms ] threadMy memory is very hazy, it was well over 40 years ago, but I think keeping the timing under control was was one a big hurdle. Because it was single threaded and there was effectively only one interrupt, screen refresh/flyback, so you had to intersperse the music code into the main code and juggle it to even out the note timing.
I remember one game I wrote for the 16K Spectrum, and thanks to an incredibly clever & musical friend we got something like 30 seconds of a tune that had a passable resemblance to Bach's Toccata in about 20 -30 bytes of code.[1]. Every last byte mattered on that machine.
[1] Not 100% on the details but it was about that. We used a combination of base notes and mathematical progression rather than just playing a score as we could get that smaller. I think I've a dot-matrix printout of the games source code somewhere, assuming the ink hasn't faded.