PlayMOD

I still have fond childhood memories of my first home computers – devices that ultimately triggered my career in software engineering. For me these where the C64 and later the Commodore Amiga.

Whereas most of the capabilities of respective 40 years old home computers obviously look quite lacking from today’s perspective, their audio features have aged rather gracefully and I feel that the audio stuff is much better suited to preserve the nostalgia – e.g. as compared to the blocky pixel graphics or underwhelming computing power.

I later learned that even though the above devices where obviously the best that ever existed (cough), other people share similar nostalgia but with regard to other devices and their audio features (Atari, ZX Spectrum, PC, etc). Large collections of respective legacy music files are actually being collected by respective enthusiasts and can be found on the internet (e.g. https://modland.com/pub/modules/). Though for some of the legacy formats it may be challenging to find a suitable music player that actually runs on contemporary hardware.

PlayMOD is a page that combines all the online Web music players that I created/ported over the years. The project dates back from 2019 but it still is a work in progress (more information can be found here: https://jwothke.wordpress.com/2019/03/11/playmod/):

You can try the online version corresponding to the above screenshot here: https://www.wothke.ch/playmod/index.php?file=%2F%24MOD+favorites%2FMODLAND%2FProtracker%2FEstrayk%2Fdefjam.mod&emulator=MPT&fxid=6&tab=fx

(The amount of files available in the collections can be somewhat frustrating – particularly since not all songs are actual gems.. the above link therefore leads to a manually compiled playlist.  Use the “Home” icon at the top of the playlist to navigate to the root of the folder structure to start your own exploration.)

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