Welcome back! Today we're gonna dive in to the second generation of video game consoles, where things start to get (a little) more interesting in the music department. Namely, there's actually music! There were actually quite a few consoles released in this generation, but I'm only going to cover what I've gathered to be the top 4: the Magnavox Odyssey2, Atari 2600 (and 5200), Mattel's Intellivision, and the ColecoVision.
The Atari came back swinging in 1977 with the 2600 model, boasting colors and better sound. It was an incredibly popular console, but compared to other consoles of this generation, I personally think it's a bit lacking. It had two monaural monophonic channels. Let's clear this up now; monaural, or mono, means not stereo. Monophonic means one sound at a time. A flute is a monophonic instrument. You can't play chords on a flute, you can only play one note at a time. A guitar is a polyphonic instrument. You can play up to 6 notes at a time. Anyway, it had two monophonic channels, so that means it could only ever play 2 sounds at once, and it only had 4 bits of audio control (meaning 16 volume levels). It had 5 bits of pitch control (32 values), 4 bit control unit to change the timbre of the sound, meaning all sounds were pre-programmed, and you would simply switch between the two you wanted (two channels, remember?). Here's a
gameplay video, and here's a list of those sounds, which I found on
this great website.
In 1982, Atari released the 5200, which basically included ports of the old games with updated graphics and sound (here's the
same game from above, but on the 5200), but it was pretty much a failure because it was difficult to set up, and had a horrible controller. I mean,
look at this thing. What the hell? Anyway, the sound is pretty much the same as well, except it had twice as many channels.
This is the Magnavox Odyssey 2, released in 1978. I'd talk more about it, but who cares, it didn't really bring anything new to the table and ended up being Magnavox's last moderately successful home console (Nintendo and Sega pretty much take over in the next generation). Alright, if you really wanna know, it did have a wider pitch range than the Atari 2600, but it could really only handle one sound at a time. That, and it had some serious color and only-so-many-moving-things-on-the-screen-at-once limitations. Check out
Killer Bees! if you want to see for yourself.
Okay, now things get interesting. This is Mattel's Intellivision, released in 1979. Yeah, Mattel made a video game console! Who knew? (I did.) It didn't have as many colors as the Atari, but it had no problem displaying all of them at once, and the sound card? Oh man, now we're getting in to some cool stuff. The card had 3 monophonic tone generators, and one noise generator (I never really went in to detail about the noise waveform, but just head back
here to find out for yourself). With more channels at the system's disposal, it could actually provide
a soundtrack to the games you played on it! Notice how the noise channel is being used to emulate drums, isn't that neat? And notice how the music is written around the technological limitations! With one channel on drums, what remains is one channel for the main melody, and one channel to play bass ... and then switch out to play the harmony for the melody. The bass can't be constant, because there's not enough channels.
So yeah! Music! But there's more! This console also introduced a technology known as
Pulse-Code Modulation. I know I just linked you to the wikipedia article, but it's still difficult to understand, so let me take a crack at it. PCM is a way to digitally represent an analog audio signal. Analog as in the human voice, or an acoustic instrument. This is done by taking the analog signal, slicing it up in to segments, and approximating its waveform. The older the technology, the less accurate the approximation (this takes a lot of data space to accomplish), and the human voice isn't simple like a sine wave is. Here, check out this picture:
The red line is a sine wave. Remember sine waves? I hope so, I only told you about them a week ago. Anyway, think of the sine wave as the analog signal. The grey squares are the digital representation of the sine wave. It's rounded off, in small slices, to the nearest value. This results in something close to the original signal, but ... bitcrushed (it's absurdly backwards using that word to describe this process). A great way to think about this is imagining a smooth curve in a jpg file. If you open it in photoshop, and zoom in, you notice it's not actually a curved line, but a collection of small squares (pixels!) that are small enough to fool us in to thinking it's actually a smooth curved line. Now, imagine if the pixels were much, much larger. It would look less like a curved line, and more boxy, right? Well, there ya go.
And here's what it sounded like (back then). As the technology improved, more and more data space was able to be devoted to this, meaning playback become more and more accurate, more believable. Anyway, that's the Intellivision, and
here's a gameplay video for kicks.
A bit of bonus information I learned: the sound card in the Intellivision wasn't even designed to do PCM! But some crazy computer guys apparently found a way. And that's interesting to me.
Alright, last stop for the second generation, and ... well ... it's really nothing new, after the Intellivision. This is the ColecoVision, released in 1982. So 3 years later and the technology didn't change much, except now sound cards are meant to have PCM. ColecoVision games had soundtracks, and in 3 channels, like the Intellivision. Though I should mention that full soundtracks were still kind of rare. It was much more common to just have
short jingles before play, and this is because, again, there's only so many sound channels. Can't forget about sound effects, can we!? If all 3 or so channels are dedicated to music, then the game's not gonna have any sound! Or the music will have to cut out every time a sound is played, and when there's only 3 or so channels that becomes very noticeable. For example, in
Donkey Kong.
You know what's really odd about this generation, though? Really strange, and something that would never, ever happen in today's video game economy? The Intellivision and ColecoVision
could play Atari 2600 games. Cross-platform backwards compatibility! Mind blowing! (To me.)
Well, that's that! Thanks for reading, and stay tuned because I'm gonna take this history of video game music all the way up to present day! Cheers!
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