Star Wars Theme in BASIC

Bah dah daaaaah dah

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In early 1981, the computers that were available could mostly just do a few beeps and bloops, except for the Atari 400 and 800, of course. Those computers were ahead of their time and could do 4-voice sound.

In the March 1981 edition of the Atari Computer Enthusiasts newsletter there was an article called “Music without the Composer Cartridge” by Ron Ness.

Atari Computer Enthusiasts Newsletters Vol. I

This article has a BASIC program written by “Aaron Ness-age 14” that is the Star Wars theme encoded as a bunch of data statements. I typed it all in from the fuzzy text of my copy.

This is the first part of the program. The rest is 100+ lines of DATA statements!

You can hear the theme here:

It’s a little off in places, but this is still an amazing job. Imagine what it must have been like in 1981 to be able to hear a computer play this! All an Apple II or Commodore PET could do were simple bleeps. The Commodore VIC-20 was not out yet¹ and the Commodore 64 with its powerful SID chip was 1.5 years away.

Goto 10 members can find the BASIC source code included with the disk image perks. Or you can download the full source as text: StarWarsThemeBASIC.txt

Update May 2025: Jerry White, creator of many public domain Atari programs for ACE, has also made updated BASIC programs that play other Star Wars music. You can find his programs at AtariMania.

1. At least not in the US.