Star Wars Theme in BASIC
Bah dah daaaaah dah
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.
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.
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
At least not in the US.
Exactly as it should be. As performed by R2D2, of course.
Really cool! It almost sounds like the Star Wars Arcade game on the 800...