Old Chips

In 1995, I was mostly tracking in Scream Tracker 3 and “Tiny Chip’s Revenge” was my first chip tune produced as an S3M.

Originally, “chip tunes” had to be produced on hardware with actual synthesizers on a chip – hence the name – such as Commodore 64’s SID or ZX Spectrum’s AY-3-8910. On the Amiga and IBM PC, no such standard synthesizer chips were available, so “chip tunes” were rather faithful emulations produced using samples.

Besides the oldschool sound, the other defining characteristic of chip tunes was file size. Somewhere around 10 kilobytes was usually the upper file size limit and had to be adhered to if you wanted to participate in a chip tune competition.

“Tiny Chip’s Revenge” was produced during Christmas of 1995 for a diskmag called “Ultramag #1”, but I have no idea what happened to it, who was going to make it, or whether it was ever made.

Unreleased as it seemingly were, I entered the 10k chip tune into the Solskogen 2017 Oldskool Music Competition under the name Ferris III Y.O. as a nod of admiration and pull of leg to Ferris only being 3 years old when it was produced. As noted in the file info of the Solskogen entry:

"The sole thing I achieve is proving how awesome he is and how lame I am, though. I’m quite certain Ferris could make better music than this when he was 15 years old. So infinite amounts of love and respect to Ferris!"

And I still stand firmly by those words. :)

Oldschool Chips

Tiny Chip's Revenge

Bitbear is Asbjørn Ulsberg's tone-hammering, beat-juggling and demoscene participating alter ego.

Banner and logo design by http://anne.li.

Bitbear started fiddling with music in Pro Tracker on the Amiga 500 in the early 90's. But first when he got his hands on Scream Tracker and Fast Tracker on a PC, he started producing "real" music under the alias "Power of Creation".

He created two albums and submitted songs to various demoscene competitions throughout the 90's until he put his musical career on the shelf until it was rebooted in 2012 by entering the Kindergarden 2012 Dance Music Competition under the new-found alias Bitbear.

#demoscene #amiga #commodore #oldskool #tracker #module #protracker #screamtracker #fasttracker #soundtracker