FastTracker II - King of 8bit tunes

Nostalgia zone

As a musical update to my post about the Demo scene let me introduce to you the MOD or Module file. Before mp3 but after the computer speaker chirps and beeps came MOD file.

The quality of sound was absent in early computers as they often did not have good sound processing built-in. Some early computers did have Digital Signal Processing units or DSP installed, most notably C64 with its MOS Sound Interface Device or SID chip and Amiga with its custom chip called Paula.

Not until the mid 1980s did the sound actually arrive on personal computers, especially IBM compatible. The arrival of AdLib, SoundBlaster, and later in the 90s the most common today AC’97 most notable being produced by Realtek. There are more but AC’97 has proven quite resilient to time and obsolescence with it being released in 1997 and is still used. It offers 20bit depth at a sampling frequency of 96 kHz and 6 independent output channels.

Unlike mp3 which uses actual music and compresses it by removing all sound that humans can’t hear according to psychoacoustic which makes mp3 files a small fraction of uncompressed music, MOD file uses notes and samples to play the sound. To create MOD files you add a sample you wish to use and create a notation for it. You can change the pitch and duration of the samples. This makes it like MIDI but with a built-in software synthesizer. Where MIDI is basically a music notation that leverages your sound card's built-in instruments or external files, the MOD file contains the sequencing information and the instruments.

The files that were almost on repeat on my 286 PC back in the day were AC/DC Thunderstruck and Axel Foley, the theme song of Beverly Hills Cop.

The file sizes are small, AC/DC track is about 300kb. This of course is determined by the quality and size of your samples. MOD files are not music files, they create music in real-time from notations and samples provided the player combines everything into a piece of music.

MOD files were and still are popular in the Demo scene due to their small size, small computer hardware requirements, and most interestingly the ability to change at runtime. You could have a loop in-game and change that music loop to another or change the current one depending on what’s going on in the game. Without the need to carry all the music premade. Sadly MOD files are no longer popular as there is no need for them. With the drop in price and increase in storage capacity keeping music files has never been easier. With that said, MOD files have found their niche in Chiptunes, a sub-gender of electronic music with the feel and sound of vintage arcade machines, computers, and video game consoles. A large repository of MOD files is maintained by modarchive.org.

And according to Wikipedia some of today’s popular electronic artists started out using MOD or one of its offspring formats. Artists like Darude, TDK, Aphrodite, Infected Mushroom, and Deadmau5 started with MOD files.

Now, back to FastTracker 2. It was created by Fredrik "Mr. H" Huss and Magnus "Vogue" Högdahl, two members of the demogroup Triton, who later founded Starbreeze Studios and developed games like Payday2, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and Assault on Dark Athena, 2012 Syndicate, The Darkness, and others. The player had its final release of 2.09 in August 1999 and only worked under MS-DOS, but there is a clone for Windows/macOS/Linux made by Olav 8bitbubsy Sørensen . Thanks for preserving a part of music and computer history 8bitbubsy.

It was one of the best sequencers at that time and still kinda is regardless of its 20+ years. But now it has a spiritual successor in Open ModPlug Tracker. It’s more adult and built for Windows which brings all the good things with it, like copy and paste.

And not to forget, FastTracker II has a built-in Nibbles game that has a multiplayer mode which as kids we played extensively while listening to chiptune music.