Will Harvey's Music Construction Set

The Good
I was given MCS as a gift back when I was a kid. We owned a PCjr at the time. I'm a natural-born piano player with a great ear for music. This program has become a permanent part of my musical past, present and (as long as DOSBox is around) future.

For its time, this app was amazing. It did some really neat tricks with the SN76496, even creating percussive-type sounds (they sound more like water droplet effects than anything). As a notation program, it's excellent for its time. The visual representations of the musical elements are fairly accurate (given the 320x200 resolution) and the scrolling effect is really neat as your song plays back!

It has its own FAT12 interpreter and disk access routines - running independent of DOS because it booted directly off a floppy. A neat trick you could do was to save songs on your own floppy with the .MCD extension (rather than the default MCS) and then put the program in demo mode - it'd cycle through all the songs on your disk with MCD extension and loop. Provided interesting "Background music" if that makes your style.

The Bad
There are definite limitations in the program but I don't hold any of them against it given its age. First of all, the tempo setting is very discrete and doesn't offer much flexibility, and the majority of the slider puts you in tempos way below 120BPM so you only have maybe 5 or 6 useful tempo choices. It can make some songs sound either too fast or too slow.

There were some other interesting limitations that you could work around with little quirks. For example, the actual output of notes is shifted up one semitone from what you lay down on the staff. So if you put down a C, the actual note played is a C#. I don't know exactly why this is, but if you have perfect pitch (like me) it will bug you a bit.

The range of notes is limited but I think this is more related to the SN76496 than the program. SN76496 chips couldn't easily go below certain frequencies, so the program bottoms out at a low B flat. No, scratch that. An interesting quirk you could do was put a flat on the low B at the beginning of the song (to make the whole song have B flats) and then put an additional flat in a measure, and you'd get the low A. Odd quirk but I've used it in a few of my songs. Only problem is then you'l have to "natural" all the other B notes in the bass staff if you aren't playing in a key that uses B flat.

The staff can be printed out but as was mentioned by Trixter it prints down the left side of the page vertically. The reason I can think of for this is simplicity. It more or less sends the same bitmap it draws on screen to the printer. Yeah they could probably have gotten more elaborate and made it print proper page sheet music, but still, for its time, the ability to do notation on the home computer and print it out at all is still pretty cool.

The Bottom Line
I was hooked ever since I first played with MCS and it's never subsided. I actually kept the PCjr around for quite some time just to run MCS. The PCjr sadly failed miserably and repairing it was out of my budget. I played with MCS in the MESS emulator for a while but it was a pain to use.

Then I discovered DOSBox. I had discovered heaven (haha). It's pretty amusing (And sweet!) to see MCS running in full-screen glory on my little Eee netbook complete with PCjr sound!

I still to this day compose tunes in MCS, and you can even hear some of my recent creations on Youtube at my channel http://www.youtube.com/fuzzyflint (thanks to DOSBox's video capture utility)

For anyone who's interested in playing with old software, who has some musical knowledge, and just wants to have fun, MCS is still a fun program. I have a complete MIDI setup and studio equipment but there's nothing that can compare to MCS in its three-voice polyphonic glory.

The Good
I liked the idea of Music Construction Set, but in the end my ears just could not take the abuse. If I owned a Tandy/PCjr maybe my review would be different. The interface was quite revolutionary for the PC back in 84 and easy to use. I think Will Harvey deserves some credit here, and the person who decided on a PC port should be shot.

The Bad
Okay, after two seconds of multi voice "music" coming out of a PC, the wow factor simply vanishes. Once the enjoyment of listening to the progrom goes away, the point of using it ceases. All of the other features this program has revolve around playing music, for obvious reasons.

The Bottom Line
If you want a headache and bad music stuck in your head, get this program. Me? I'll put the 8-Track in and listen to Thriller -- anything is better than this.

The Good
This program is ahead of its time: it has possibly the first-ever use of a drag-and-drop interface! You use the joystick (the mouse was not yet common enough in everyday computers) to pick up notes and drop them onto a staff at the top of the screen. Do this enough, and you make music. The staff can be scrolled left and right, to create longer songs, depending on how much memory you had (subject to the limits of mid-1980's computers, of course).

People accuse this game of sounding bad, as if it's the game's fault. At this time, the AdLib had not been invented, much less the SoundBlaster. Getting anything more than a single beep out of the PC speaker was next to impossible, and this program tried as hard as it could.

The Apple ][ version of this game had a similar limitation, as its speaker worked in pretty much exactly the same way as the PC speaker. However, there was an expansion card available for the Apple ][, called the Mockingboard! Using a Mockingboard with this program, after getting used to just the built-in Apple ][ speaker sound, was an epiphany. Suddenly, clear 6-voice stereo sound boomed from the external speakers! The CPU, freed from the burden of attempting to produce sound from the internal speaker, now was able to smoothly scroll the music staff from right to left, lining each note up vertically as it was played! This was, to say the least, amazing.

It is a shame that a similar sound card did not exist for the PC at this time, or other people's reviews of Music Construction Set might be singing a different tune....

The Bad
As above, the built-in PC speaker sound quality is terrible. Try the Apple ][ version instead, with Mockingboard support, if you can find it.

Functionally, this program is complete, with essentially no bugs. The only nitpick is the printer support. On the Apple ][ version, it only supported parallel printers! This might have been fine on the PC, but in the Apple ][ world, most printers were serial, including the most common type of printer owned, Apple ImageWriter. In addition, the number of supported printers were extremely limited. WordPerfect this is not!

So, most people couldn't print their music. Of those that could, they were disappointed by the extremely poor quality of the printed music. The music, instead of being printed in horizontal rows, instead ran vertically down the page as one continuous strip. The paper had to be cut into sections and then taped back together! This was probably done due to memory limitations at the time. Still, this program is great for music editing and playing, but not printing.

The Bottom Line
This is not really a game, but a tool for learning about music, composing music, and playing music. It is historically important for having the first drag-and-drop interface, complete with icons, and for being a breakthrough in computer music creation.

One of the best things to do with this program is to enter music that you have been assigned to play, perhaps for piano lessons (something that 1980's parents often foisted upon their children). By entering music and using this program to play it back, you can hear how the music is supposed to sound! This will help you practice the piece and learn to play it yourself.

There are many good songs included with this program, that really show off what it can do.

BTW, want to hear really good music coming from an ordinary PC speaker? Try playing the original version of Pinball Fantasies, with no sound card. The game runs at full speed, and somehow, it plays full digital music through the PC speaker! By the early 1990's, CPU power had grown to the point where it was possible to compute exact sound waves and send them through the PC speaker (via oversampling, and by programming the PC timer to an extremely high interrupt rate), while continuing to play the game without slowdown, something that was not possible in the time of Music Construction Set.

The Good
For anyone wanting to compose music on an actual staff with a computer, Music Construction Set was a breath of fresh air. The construction-set metaphor that was first marketed successfully in Bill Budge's Pinball Construction Set was borrowed for MCS, and it works very well. You literally use the keyboard, joystick or Koala pad (remember those?) to "grab" notes, rests, etc. from the "toolbox" and drop them onto the bass or treble clef.

For those with a Tandy or PCjr, clear 3-voice music was attainable. For those not so fortunate, the internal PC speaker code used a clever hack that somehow mixed four voices into one, allowing you to hear all four voices. The "instruments" were essentially a sine wave, but I discovered a great side-effect of such simple representation: You stopped listening to how the music sounded, and started paying attention to how it was written. Several pieces of music theory "clicked" for me just listening to the music and seeing how it looked onscreen.

The program supported printing sheet music through any common (Epson FX-80 or IBM Graphics Printer compatible) dot-matrix printer so that you could show your creations to real :-) musicians.

The Bad
Unfortunately, the PC speaker hack, however clever, did not produce sound that was aurally pleasing to the ears. I still remember the puzzled looks I got from my friends and family as I played my latest MCS compositions for them--on a tiny piezo speaker that sounded like a symphony of bees. I didn't mind it, but looking back I think my brain was filling in for what the speaker couldn't produce. Rose-colored headphones, anyone?

While the program could print sheet music, it did so one staff per page, vertically, along the left edge of the paper. I cannot think of any proper reason for this except laziness.

The Bottom Line
Music Construction Set will forever be ingrained in my computing past. If you have a Tandy or PCjr and would like to play around with music, then by all means, give MCS a try.

The Good
Aah, a classic :-) One of the first programs I had on the good ole' XT (and still do, by the way), this thing amazed me - how the hell does it produce multiple sound channels on the measly PC speaker, through which I only knew how to play tunes using GWBASIC's PLAY statement? I had several example tunes for this program, most of which simply delighted me as I just sat there listening to them for hours. I even printed out a few tunes to play on an my old synth.

The Bad
What's not to like? It's not really an "educational" piece and it does it job really well.

The Bottom Line
Hell, if you appreciate old software, you'll love this one.