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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Boxy’s Lament

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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:

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Well, I was wrong.  Or rather, I discovered that while a) and b) are still true, I am also c) VERY interested in enhancing the Apple II with hardware when it comes to sound.  Inspired by the 8 bit Sound and Fury site, I acquired a Mockingboard and started looking around for a more complex set-up that would include a music keyboard I could use to make real-time synthesized music on the Apple II.

Several weeks ago I bought a set-up that realizes this wish.  It includes the Passport Designs Soundchaser keyboard and accompanying interface card and software, and the two Mountain Computer Music System cards that actually do the music synthesis.  I also picked up a Decillionix DX-1 Sound Sampling card at the same time.

Here you can see the Music System cards (connected to each other by their alarmingly thin white ribbon) in slots 4 and 5, and the Soundchaser interface card in slot 7 (behind the Music System cards you can see the Mockingboard and the DX-1):

Here’s the Soundchaser keyboard with its software running in the background.  The rainbow ribbon in the lower left runs from the Soundchaser interface card into the keyboard.

The Soundchaser’s software interacts with the Music System cards to play two sounds simultaneously whenever you hit a key.  The two sounds (oscillators) each have separate envelope parameters (attack, decay, sustain, release) that can be tweaked in real-time, and there’s also a Low Frequency Oscillator effecting both sounds that likewise can be tweaked real-time.  In addition, three basic waveforms (one for each sound + one for the LFO) can be separately edited.  All of that means there’s quite a lot of flexibility and fun to be had in playing around with the various settings to produce different sounds.  (This seems in stark contrast with the software that came with the Music System cards – its default sounds are horrible and tweaking them seems fairly laborious — it seems like the Soundchaser folks did some careful thinking about how to get better sound out of the Music System than the Music System’s original creators did.)  Once you have tweaked a particular voice to your liking, you can save its settings to disk as a Preset to be recalled again.  10 Preset voices (default or your own) are loaded at any one time, and you can switch between them while playing.

The DX-1 Digital Sampling card, which I hadn’t rabidly wanted like the keyboard (I almost didn’t get it), ended up being quite versatile.  It can hold up to 8 digital samples at once (the total depends on the size of the individual samples), and comes with three sets of example samples on its accompanying disk.  It actually has a very clean sound and responds great to real time, musically-pitched playing (triggering) via the Soundchaser keyboard. I haven’t tried sampling an original sound yet, I need to buy a proper cable for that.

The following example recording is a sloppy mess, but it gives you an idea of some of the sounds the Soundchaser and DX-1 are capable of.  This was mostly recorded one track at a time, with a little double-tracking on the Apple II via the Soundchaser software’s 4-track recording feature.  The drums are the DX-1 in ‘rhythm mode’ (ie, a loop) – occasionally played backwards (a DX-1 feature), and the bass line and first (and sporadically recurring) lead are both DX-1 samples being played in real-time via the Soundchaser.  All the other sounds are produced by the Soundchaser software via real-time playing of the keyboard.

(Download ‘The Awkward Party’)

Anyway, with this fun new gear, I hope to produce a new bit of Apple II music every month for the Mozomedia Music Podcast, starting with the June episode.

© JJ Sonick for Apple II Adventures, 2009. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: dx-1, hardware, keyboard, sampling, songs, soundchaser

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Here it is installed in slot 4 (that’s the Disk Controller card in slot 6).

Here’s another shot that shows the stereo jack line running out the back of the IIe:

The auction made it clear that the speech synthesis aspect of this clone was iffy, but that’s fine with me, because it’s the music/sound effect aspect of it that I’m interested in.

I ran the stereo jack to the two desktop speaker/floor bass speaker unit I’d previously used with a PC that died a year and half ago (the speakers had just been gathering dust), and it sounds great!  I went through the Mockingboard demo disk and also loaded up Ultima IV and liked what I heard.

I’ve gone through a Word doc version of the Mockingboard manual, but I haven’t had time yet to make any original music with it.  But here’s a sample of some of the Ultima IV music playing though it, which is charming enough to almost make me want to try to finish that game again.  Both Virtual II and AppleWin do pretty good Mockingboard emulation, but, of course, there’s something special about hearing the real thing (or a clone of the real thing ):  Unfortunately, I only have one mike, which means this is a mono recording and you’re missing the cool way the two lead voices are each panned to a different speaker, but it still gives you a taste of Mockingboard-ness:

>> Listen to the Ultima IV title screen music played through the Mockingboard clone

(Edit: I’ll try a direct-in stereo recording later this week, and replace the mono one above with it if I’m successful)

© JJ Sonick for Apple II Adventures, 2008. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 3rd party card, hardware, mockingboard, ultima

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Simon’s site and an email conversation with him lead me to look closer at Michael’s RT.SYNTH, which allows the real-time playing (via your computer keyboard) of 8 different synthesized instruments (one instrument at a time), each of which can play in 6 octaves. You can switch between instruments and octaves in real-time, and record and play back your performance as well. It’s is all software-driven, requiring nary a Mockingboard or other add-on hardware. For all the juicy details, visit Michael’s site (linked to above).

It is also possible to build new virtual instruments (voices) for RT.SYNTH. After I emailed him about creating new voices, Michael kindly provided extra info and some programs he uses to build the voices. I had many false starts, producing wav files (transferred to disk images thanks to Apple Commander) that crashed the voice-generation programs, and after that producing voices that crashed RT.SYNTH once loaded.

But fortunately I was able to produce two new, working voices. I have to say, it really helps to do work like this on an emulator, as parts of the audio-processing procedure would be painfully slow on the actual Apple, whereas I could crank Virtual II‘s speed up and whip through it (which also made it less painful to start over when the voice didn’t work). On the other hand, Virtual II’s sound emulation, which is solid in general, makes a slow-responding, tinny mess of RT.SYNTH’s music. To really hear its instruments as intended, you need to run RT.SYNTH on an actual Apple. So once I discovered the voices were functional, I was happy to transfer their disk image over to my IIc via ADTPro and try them out for real.

Both voices are based on a sample of one of Logic Pro’s clavinet instruments, which I’m very fond of. By the time I had created the first non-crashing voice, I had still messed up either the sample, the sequencing of the sample, or both, but it turned out to be a happy accident, as it produced a off-kilter spacey timbre that would not sound out of place in an 80′s video game:

>> Hear a bit of the Spacey Voice

The second non-crashing voice used more portions of the same sample, and was more ‘correctly’ constructed, as it sounds more like the original. But it’s too short (fades too quickly for it to achieve the clavinet sound) and ends up not be as fun as the ‘mistake’ voice. I’ll revisit it later and try to get it closer to the clavinet original:

>> Hear some of the Sorta-Clavinet-y Voice

I’ll be sure to work on some more voices, and post a disk image of them once I’ve made a decent collection, for any other RT.SYNTH users to try out.

© JJ Sonick for Apple II Adventures, 2008. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: RT.SYNTH, sampling, virtual instruments

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