Holiday Music Week III at r/Retrobattlestations

Once again the season is upon us, and that means it’s Holiday Music Week over at /r/Retrobattlestations. Holiday Music Week III, to be precise.

While I fired up the Apple IIgs for a previous HMW, this year I’ve put the 160MHz AMD 5×86-based DOS box out front, letting it croon tunes of the seasons through its Gravis Ultrasound sound card (with 1MB sample RAM onboard). I made a three-part post during the building of the system in question, and it was motivated by a “new” release of the long-idle but still-excellent CapaMod player [ download ] that can be seen playing the tune in the video. CapaMod or CMOD is a GUS-only player that was originally released in 1994 by Heikki Ylinen (“flap”) of Capacala and maintained until 1996. Then, out of nowhere, an update came in 2008 with an indication from flap that it’s the last update the player will see. (But he’s said that before…)

The track in question is “December” by Necros of Legend Design, a 400K S3M utilizing nine voices — in this case, hardware voices thanks to the lovely Gravis Ultrasound nestled within this 486-class system of mine.

Happy Holidays!