Background music for 8-bit games – ideas?

[rax]

Hi everyone,

As I mentioned before, lately I keep hitting the same problem over and over again — music. In my opinion, for a game to feel truly finished, it needs decent background music, and that’s exactly my weakest point.

I’m trying to make the music myself (8-bit, limited hardware, you know the deal), and I also tried generating music with AI, but honestly the result was pretty terrible. Overall, it’s quite hard and so far I haven’t managed to get anything I’m happy with.

So I decided to ask here:
has anyone thought about this topic and knows where free / non-licensed 8-bit music suitable for games can be found?

I have a few more finished puzzle games that currently have no music at all precisely because of this issue. I’d be interested to hear how you handle it — whether you use existing resources, convert something, or write everything yourself.

Any ideas and shared experience are very welcome

[iss]

Indeed, this is big problem!
Just to specify: format should be one of the supported AY,YUM,MYM,PT3,MIDI etc.

[Dbug]

Imo, there are people around willing to make music for games and demos, historically the problem had been that there were only the Twilighte music tools which ran natively on the Oric.

Now that we have a decent Arkos player routine, it's possible to use the Arkos Tracker, so I'm pretty sure there are people out of the Oric scene willing to make music for your projects, as long as you are clear on the restrictions in size and features (like "no sample sound or timer effects" and "final music in XYZ format should be at must this amount of kilobytes").

Xeron had Hoffman make the music for his three Nova demos, and I had XiA make the music for Encounter, I'm reasonably certain that there are other people who would be happy to do that as well!

[Chema]

I always had some mixed feelings about this. Don't get me wrong, I love background music, as long as it a) sounds great and b) does not compromise the game experience itself. I trend to think that the Oric is not really suitable for this. It takes a lot of resources to get a good song playing without annoying (plus some tools removed the possibility of changing the master volume to create effects, and the Oric sounds too loud). Everything gets worse if having music removes the sfx.

I tried hard to have music and sfx, and failed with Oricium. Ended up making my own engine to play tunes so they were small in size and ended up with tunes in a few hundred bytes, but ended up with a rather simple player (too simple, probably). And letting sfx play at the same time, never really worked (I designed a system with priorities for the channels, which worked quite well for accumulating many different sfx, but never with songs).

Anyway, I always sucked with music as I sucked with graphics, so maybe I simply never got the thing right!

How much memory does the Arkos tracker need? And one song with enough variety to play in the background continuously? And CPU?

[Dbug]

I'm not fan of permanent music in games as well, they tend to get annoying, but it's nice to have music in the intro, outro, and possibly some jingles when things happen, or even a few notes when a battle starts for example.

Regarding memory and speed, Arkos tracker takes less memory and less CPU than replaying a MYM compressed register stream, but I've not spent time looking at the exact amount, but both of Xeron demos are playing effects while playing Arkos music, so it's probably not that terrible!

But yes, profiling would probably be a good idea, that could actually be a valid article topic of the OSDK site, like how to export and convert a music, how to integrate the replay routine, and how much CPU it takes, and how many kilobytes per minute it uses.

[Xeron]

Xeron had Hoffman make the music for his three Nova demos,

How many nova demos?

[Dbug]

Xeron had Hoffman make the music for his three Nova demos,

How many nova demos?

No idea what you are talking about!

[rax]

I agree with you.

As Dbug mentioned, in-game music can indeed become annoying over time (even if it is quite standard in many other 8-bit games), so having an option to disable it is important.

Regarding the technical side, ISS has already done quite a lot of work on the player side (he can probably explain the details better). At the moment, it is possible to adjust the volume levels of both the music and the sound effects, with four different levels available. This helps to keep a reasonable balance, even considering the limitations Chema pointed out.

Unfortunately, music really takes a lot of memory, which is a serious constraint. Still, for smaller games there may be enough room for it, and in those cases it can add a nice finishing touch rather than being a constant distraction.

To make this clearer, I will prepare a small demo that demonstrates the different volume levels for both the music and the sound effects.

[Chema]

That is why I made my own player: it is optimized (well... sort of) for size, both in the player code and in the songs, and it is also used for sfx. I made several test programs so I could check how the songs played. Here is the screenshot of the music test program showing sizes:

Captura de pantalla 2026-01-22 121700.png

But, yeah, the player is simplistic...

[Dbug]

Music indeed takes potentially a lot of room, but you all tend to release tape based games, this limitation mostly disappears when making a game for disk systems because you don't have to have the intro and the game in memory at the same time, and also you can use most of the overlay memory for stuff like the music

[jsk]

Wow, that's great sizes!

What format does it play, and particularly how are the sfx made. I'm assuming you have conversion tools from other vaste sources of polyphonic music?

That is why I made my own player: it is optimized (well... sort of) for size, both in the player code and in the songs, and it is also used for sfx.
I made several test programs so I could check how the songs played. Here is the screenshot of the music test program showing sizes:
Captura de pantalla 2026-01-22 121700.png

But, yeah, the player is simplistic...

[Chema]

Oh, well.. it uses the SMF-H (Standard Music Format from Hell), which means I put the notes and commands by hand. If you look at the sources, you'll see what I mean. It is the mot annoying system possible. I never came up with anything as an editor.