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beat_poetry descriptioncore narration noir tom waits

a soundchip story inspired by the likes of tom waits, the narrator guy from bastion, and craig finn. this was silly and very very fun to make lol... uses mostly super audio cart and chipsynth sfc

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times were hard in the fakebit era,
you could barely get a soundchip anywhere but for a speakeasy,
nondescript basement doors to a club where the smoke hung high like white noise in the air,
the tap was a neverending portamento downwards,
and the barkeep an invariably shifty fellow who ya never knew if he was gonna give you an ay-3-8910 or an ay-8930.
sure there was a password, but 2a03 was on everyone's lips back then,
fresh off the black market and loose as a dpcm pitch change,
or won in a back alley clash over what the phony dealer claimed was the "good stuff".

well old mikey said he had a line on some spc700s,
and the last time anybody heard about one of those was a fella 'bout burnt himself to a crisp tryin'a hook up some transistors.
more fakes, no doubt, everyone was on their counterfeit game then, the poor kid just got suckered like we all had one time or another.
the catch was, the dealer, some fella callin' himself puke8, he wanted a whole damn amiga 500 in exchange for the batch.
it took a few drinks for us to convince him the deal was gonna be worth it for the crew, even though mikey loved that thing,
"just think about it man, do it for the demoscene..."

so still off the backs of our fresh inebriation we hauled ass across state lines in paula's truck to the fine city of new detroit, michigan,
where all the kids on the block were slingin' reverb and compressors and all manner of newfangled dsp contraptions where you could just tell they ain't never heard of a polyphony limit.
we pulled up to what looked to be an old mansion, "cave dingle" cheekily written on a sign by the gate,
and we weren't too sure what we were getting ourselves into,
but one step inside had all the operators in our brains modulatin' up a storm.
it was clear this fella was the real deal;
stacks of ym2612s on the tables, boxes full a' ym2151 and 2608, even the humble sn76489 was represented in this fella's collection.
this was the mother lode.

the deal itself was handled with all the efficacy one might expect of a professional;
counting up the spc700 chips in front of the guy almost seemed silly.
this ain't the movies after all.
but in no time flat we were on our way back home with a box full of the bona fide good stuff.
even in this dismal fakebit era,
we could appreciate these 8 channels of sampled sound, that 64 kilobytes of audio ram, and that sweet, sweet echo delay.
kids these days... well, hell. all we can do is hope our art doesn't die out by keeping the underground movement going.
chiptune is dead; long live chiptune.

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