First, thanks to Henry Spragens for leaving a comment on the Boxy’s Lament post, pointing to his site where he has samples of various fascinating 8-bit Apple II music experiments he did. Lots of pics/info on sound hardware of the time and a bunch of great music demos, be sure to check it out!

Second, I wanted to feature an abandoned Apple II project of mine.  As has been noted in Apple II retro-dom, The TV series LOST featured an Apple II (with the Apple logo replaced by a Dharma one and, apparently, an Apple III monitor being used?) as the “Dharma Initiative computer” — most prominently in Season 2.

Between Season 5 & 6, I had an idea to make an actual Apple II program that would simulate connecting to the Dharma Initiative’s DharmaTel network.  After connecting, the user would recieve a report, from the DI’s perspective, on the cataclysmic Incident that served as the climax of Season 5 and a focal plot point of much of the show.  The user would type out various keywords (highlighted in all caps in the report) to navigate to various parts of the report.  It would include images from the show, translated into Apple II hi-res screens via the jpeg-to-HGR-screen routine I posted about earlier, and use the Beagle Brother’s Pronto DOS to allow somewhat speedy loading of those images.

I made a VERY short demo of the idea, and embedded the disk image in an AppleIIGo java applet. Here’s a screenshot:

Dharmatel Report Demo screenshot

You can try it out by clicking the link below.  Enter anything you want as the username.  You may have to click on the applet’s screen to gain focus before typing.

>> DharmaTel Report DEMO

(Note: the applet seems to hang in Mac Chrome sometimes.  Other browsers seem OK.)

(And really, I should have AppleIIGo set to monochrome monitor mode for more fidelity to the show’s computer.)

I was going to collaborate on the report entries with a friend of mine who was even more of an obsessed LOST fan, but I wanted to wait to see how Season 6 was going to treat the post-Incident world.  Well, the way Season 6 unfolded made the Dharma Initiative’s view of the Incident not so very important anymore, at least to my eyes, and I lost enthusiasm for completing the project.

I still enjoy the image of Desmond messing with the Dharma Apple II with the lid off, though.

© JJ Sonick for Apple II Adventures, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: AppleIIGo, Dharma Initiative, Henry Spragens, LOST, Music, sound cards

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The Green Sheen

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It appeared on the latest Mozomedia Music podcast ep, and I hope to stick to the plan of one new bit of Apple II music with each new podcast.  As well as recording The Green Sheen, I also finally got the various audio cables I properly needed for the audio cards sorted out, so now I can make good on my promise to share a stereo recording (the former one was mono) of the Ultima IV title music being played through the Apple II’s Mockingboard:

Ultima IV title music

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Getting the cables set up properly also means I now have a mic in for the DX-1 sampler, and can record my own samples!  I did a little test run of this, recording 4 sounds into a new ‘sound bank’ and saving them to disk.  Here you can hear me playing back the samples using the Soundchaser keyboard to trigger them again.  The sounds I sampled are an  ’oh’, a vocalized ‘boop’, a click noise, and a quack noise.

DX-1 custom sound samples test

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I hope to improve the sound quality with more careful, cleaner recordings of future samples, but overall I’m really impressed with DX-1.  I’ll probably ending using it much more for music than the harsher synthesized sounds from the Mountain Systems cards (but I am still interested in experimenting with custom synthesized sounds one can create with the Soundchaser software).

On the graphics front, part of this usenet thread pointed out that a jpeg-to-Apple-II-HGR-screen routine written in Java is part of the Apple II Game Server package (I still need to try out the Game Server!), and I recently compiled that routine as a standalone .jar file (currently it just looks for the jpg in a hard-coded location – if I figure out enough java to add a file selector dialogue, etc., I’ll upload the improved jar to this site).

Here was the jpg I fed into it:

And here was the HGR result:

Not too bad – actually the photo makes some the artifacts not as noticeable, but even the real screen’s still pretty nifty.  I may end up converting more jpegs to HGR screens for a project inspired by this intersection of pop culture and the Apple II:

© JJ Sonick for Apple II Adventures, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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