[Blindapple] "polyphonic" music on the 2 E?

[Jayson Smith]

Hi,

Yes, polyphonic music is somewhat hard to do on Apples other than the 
GS, but some people have done it. The entire sound capability of the 
Apple II line except for the GS is a flip flop at $c030. Reading or 
writing a byte into that location causes it to change direction, 
generating a click in the process. Every sound your Apple makes through 
the built-in speaker is achieved by accessing $C030.

Hope this helps,

Jayson

On 10/16/2017 1:03 PM, JM Casey wrote:
> Hi everyone. I was just thinking of something last night. I haven't gone
> through all the disks available on the Apple archive pertinent to this list,
> and I certainly haven't tried downloading inaccessible (as in, textalker
> won't work) disk images from other sources, but I know there's a lot of
> music stuff in the archive. When I had an Apple 2 E myself, there were a few
> disks containing music and sound stuff that were occasionally fun to play
> with. All of them, though, played monophonic music - as in, music with just
> one voice: a melody line without any harmony, counterpoint or anything like
> that. There was one disk that we got for my sighted sister, though, that had
> at least an intro that played a little tune with two simultaneous voices. As
> far as I know, this was the only time I ever heard the 2 E do this, so I'm
> guessing it's not very common at all. I don't know what the disk was called
> and it was certainly not blind-person friendly. I actually remember trying
> to access the disk because I was curious about it, but it dixdn't seem
> compatible with either Prodos or Dos 3.3.
>
>   
>
> But anyway, I'm not wondering about that particular disk or anything, but
> rather about the idea of multi-voiced music on the 2 E in general. Is this
> really hard to pull off? How common is it exactly? I know the sound
> capabilities of the 2 E were rather limited, maybe even compared with those
> of the contemporaenous Commodore computers, for example (I seem to recall my
> cousin's C64 having games that played tunes with harmony and so on). I just
> thought it was weird that out of all the disks I had, only this one silly
> kids' game where you had to match pictures or something played anything
> resembling music with more than one voice. I'm guessing this had to be done
> in machine language and that the programmes may have been so large that they
> would have overwritten textalker, or something like that? Otherwise, why
> wouldn't programmers do this more often?
>
>
>
>
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