so always on the hunt for funky old sound programs or consolizer synthesiser machines to sporadically chuck in a video about here and there! jumping back onto a program on an apple ii next but if anyone knew of any cool ones! please let us know! I have a Yamaha cx5m I have a long overdue video I need to do it on, but the biggest problem is I cannot for the life of me read music notation so its been a bit of a kicker on that one haha. unless anyone knew of any programs on the CX5m not using the god awful thing that is music notation!?!?!?!? cheerzzzzz
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A very quick Google brings up:
DMS-II looks like some kind of trackery thing.
C64 wise thereās Darkbox that seems like a bit of an unknown trackerā¦ Link and Video .
Iām not sure if you can get Darkbox on cartridge, it appears to be a disk image only.
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The one Iām most familiar with is LSDJ, but of course you probably know more about making music on Gameboys than anybody else in the worldā¦
The most iconic music computers I can think of are the Fairlight CMI famously used by Kate Bush and the Synclavier used by Frank Zappa. I suspect these are not cheap-on-eBay finds, though.
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to be honest it has been on the old to do list to look into a tracker on C64 dark box looks good actually! there are a few. but yeah need to work out which one to focus on to get to the bottom of!
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I would love to hunt down a fairlight to use for a week for a video. few and far between! there was one at the SMEM in Switzerland but we couldnāt get it to boot up when we were there I wonder if they got it up and running. LSDJ is a fair point! I havent done a video solely on that. and to be perfectly honest im a bit rusty on it. maybe that would make a good vid to get back into the swing of LSDJ especially with the sheer amount of updates it has had!
Can you get copies of LSDJ on all the Gameboys in the megamachineā¦
The only issue with Darkbox is that the manual has been lost to the ether. Iām sure you can figure it out 
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The ZX Spectrum had a very basic music program made by a chap named Simon C. Tillson for a magazine:
I had a go a while back recording the output from the demo song they had. It does use music notation-y things though.
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The first Soundblaster card I got came with a tracker program called Tetra Compositor. Tetra Music Compositor. \ VOGONS
I hear its pretty stone age compared to most others but the demo song is forever seared into my mind.
I still have the .MOD song in my playlist. Thank god for foobar2000. I can listen to pretty much every tracker format and chiptune with it. Comparing the .MOD file of the demo to the one recorded on YouTube is worth a chuckle to hear the quality difference.
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I also have PICO-8, a fictional virtual 8 bit console. I run it on my Raspberry pi. The music layout tool is rather confusing to my eyes but maybe worth a look.
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Trackers for the Commodore64/Amiga/NES should be much easier to track down than the Fairlight, and then you donāt have to deal with sheet music eitherā¦
Is Window95 old enough to count as āvintageā these days? TS-404 was my first ever synth, I seriously loved it:
Unless you count thisā¦
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Slight tangentā¦
Back in the 1990ās there was a lot of development on OCR, to extract ASCII text from faxes and early PDF files. I worked with Tomson Financial, Research Direct and West Law to develop means to digitise copy.
Back then there were several promising musical score readers.
ScanScore seems to still be going. This will read a score and convert it to midi.
As for reading musicā¦
Shockingly awful answer is the Sibelius software. Truly designed to make non music readers feel like dirt. Avoid if you love music. IMHO
Me I used to cheat and use a transparency with the note names, solfage (do ray me) and intervals to glance at new music and āhearā it.
Learning music notation is not difficult and Iād be happy to field any questions on that score (no pun intended)
I wonder if any apps like Google lens can play a score on sight?
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There are loads of music / midi applications and hardware for the Atari ST.
any you personally are a fan of? was messing about with Gwemās tracker. but didnt get around to a vid,mebbea vid encompassing a few or something dunno h
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hey cheers! aaah alas I have tried a few times, guitar teachers used to ram it down out throats, just brain blocked, not my thing unfortunately. I think in piano rolls haha.
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Mario paint oooh yeah good idea. nice one not played that in yonks! update got a copy on the way lol
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interesting, is there any projects people have done building a console around this?
oh yeah I have seen that nice! im not really up on this era of computers. is this msdos I guess i would need to find aa comp with ssoundblaster or pop a soundblaster in correct? I must be honest building pcās after 1990 has not been something I have ever done ha
ahaĀ±! damn perfect timing I literally just yesterday lent someone a zx spectrum, gotta wait now!
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How about the Acorn Archimedes. Mostly used at schools, but they did release the A3010 for the home (which I still have)
For music, you had two main choices that Iām aware of. You had the musical notation editing software called āMaestroā. You basically dragged musical notes on a scale, and the software played them. Like this: Acorn Archimedes 310 the Midi Maestro? - YouTube
Or you could get some tracker software, and go that route. Cononiser (Cononizer?) is one that comes to mind, but there were other alternatives - such as Digital Symphony or
Desktop Tracker
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I canāt find any ādedicatedā hardware for this, but Iāve seen people build a box with a tiny 128x128 OLED display that perfectly matches the resolution of the game. It shouldnāt be too difficult to hook one up to a Pi with some arcade buttons to the GPIO pins and build a tiny console box.