Sat. Oct 5th, 2024

Sharp X1 music tools. It includes a tone creator, music composer, music player with a visualization, and a program to link your creations into, if I recall correctly, your programs. It is one of few programs that was made available on 5.25″ HD floppy disks for the system, most used 5.25″ DD disks because it was the lowest common denominator in the X1 series. It also ran at 640×400, which was not so unusual because there were two generations of their systems that could use this higher resolution.

Title screen

If you thought my art was crappy, I’m far less talented in music. First was the tone creator. To create tones, I think you need some particular kind of understanding of math, or at least an understanding of how to work with the building blocks of synthesized sound. In any event, I had no idea what I was doing.

The music compisition went a little better, but not much. I was able to generate the notes necessary for a single instrument rendition of Mary had a Little Lamb, but if I tried to add a bass line to it, it refused to play? It probably explains well in the manual, it’s very detailed, but I don’t think this is really ever going to be my strong point!

This is no fault of the X1 Turbo (Z), though. They have great sound, quite sophisticated for an 8-bit computer. It produces music by either PSG, FM, or there are even some games that use both.

The music player is pretty cool. Too bad it has such a small stock library but I guess they were counting on you making your own music! I imagine there were magazines with type-in songs, BBSes with downloadable songs, etc. I’m probably a tad late for all that.

There were around ten default songs, most recognizeably “Invisible Touch” by Phil Collins. The other song I uploaded, Oteyoman, is a kind of funky song. The others that I’ve listened to tend to be more mellow songs, undoubtedly to appease their conservative user base.

By Sean

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