Apple II Bits

Tomorrow marks the commencement of GameFest, a three-day festival celebrating the opening of a new Smithsonian exhibition: The Art of Video Games. A year ago at this time, the public was invited to vote on what games should be featured in this exhibit. Now, in 2012, we will enjoy these games receiving the recognition they deserve.

What most excites me about GameFest is the prominent role it grants one of the Apple II community’s best friends: chiptune music group 8 Bit Weapon. This group, whose work has been featured in Juiced.GS and who has collaborated with the immensely talented Michael J Mahon, will be performing live this weekend. Many of their tunes will come from the new album Bits with Byte, for which the tune "The Art of Video Games Anthem" was composed.

The album includes the song "Apple Core II", performed entirely with Apple II computers.

If you’re in the Washington, DC, area, come down to the Smithsonian to check out these awesome exhibits and performers. And if you’re not, purchase an 8 Bit Weapon album — and support those who support the Apple II!

Chiptune music is the art of using classic computing hardware to make original tunes. Usually, there’s software involved, such as DMS Drummer, and the result is emitted from the device’s inbuilt speakers.

Such is not always the case. Over the past few years, I’ve posted several videos of hard drives and printers making music, from Bohemian Rhapsody to "A Simple Text File". I also once posted a hard drive playing the "Imperial March", which proved popular enough on Digg to shut down my site. I don’t think that’ll happen this time, though, so please enjoy a floppy disk rendition of the march:

The artist’s Web site describes the method for producing this video:

The sound comes from a magnetic head moved by stepper motor. To make a specific sound, head must be moved with appropriate frequency… To move the head you need to activate the drive by pulling the DRVSB0 or 1 (depends on the cable you have and the connector – notice the crossover on the FDD ribbon cable) pin low and then falling edge on STEP pin makes the head move one step in direction dependent on DIR pin state. An ATMega microcontroller is generating those frequencies and it makes the drives play music.

Another variation is demonstrated on the Amiga using a seemingly different method:

Listen to Amiga floppy drive playing a simple music, however, not with the step motor which moves the head, but with the motor which spins the disk. This means that disk must be inserted to hear music. And there is no fear that floppy will break like with the step motor music!

I’ve yet to find any such musical demonstrations that feature an Apple II floppy disk. Do you have some? Let me know!

(Hat tip to Paul DeFilippo)

Apple II users are, almost by definition, a talented lot. We take rudimentary materials and turn them into tools of wonderful self-expression, producing works of art that are beautiful technically, visually, and aurally. This artistic value often carries over into other media as well, though we rarely have the opportunity to share that side of our lives with other Apple II users — save the rare scenario where Stan Marks pulls out his guitar at KansasFest to sing about growing up on the Mississippi delta, or the Shepherds happen to be in Boston the same weekend I’m performing in Kiss Me, Kate.

It was with some surprise that I recently stumbled across historical evidence of a renowned Apple II user’s musical talent. The late Silas Warner, best known as the creator of the classic Apple II game Castle Wolfenstein, was also "a published author and talented musician and composer in the classical European style", says Wikipedia. No links to his published writings are provided, but a pair of his musical works is available for download: the original composition "Variations on Sonata in A by Mozart (K.331)"; and Warner’s arrangement of "The Heavens are Telling, from The Creation".

Although I was eager to experience this side of the programmer, I was stymied by the files being available only in NWC format, used by the musical composition software NoteWorthy. I had neither the commercial product nor a Windows environment in which to try its free player, and my quest for alternatives or converters proved fruitless.

Finally, classifying this as an Apple II project, I turned to my fellow techies for help. Kelvin Sherlock was the first to respond: "I found this python script which can convert [NoteWorthy files] to lilypond format (lilypond is used for generating music scores but it can also generate MIDI files). Sadly, lilypond complains about a handful of errors in the converted file."

Andy Molloy then spoke up with a less technical but more effective workflow which he has generously outlined here:

1. Download and install the free Noteworthy Composer Viewer for Windows.
2. Run the Viewer, click File > Open and select the NWC file. Don’t press play until you have Audacity ready to go.
3. Download and install the free Audacity 1.3.13 beta for Windows.
4. Download the LAME MP3 encoder plugin for Audacity and follow the instructions for installation. This will let you export an Audacity recording as an MP3.
5. Run Audacity and follow the instructions to configure it to capture streaming audio. Since I was running Windows 7, I also had to first follow the Control Panel instructions.
6. On the Audacity Device ToolBar, I set the Output Device drop down box to ‘Digital Output’ and the Input Device box to ‘Stereo Mix’.
7. Push the record button in Audacity, and switch back to Noteworthy Composer Viewer and push the play button.
8. As the piece plays, you should see Audacity start to record the track.
9. When Noteworthy finishes playing, press the stop button in Audacity.
10. Save the MP3 in Audacity by clicking File > Export and change the ‘Save As Type’ to MP3.

Andy has provided the output of his efforts for embedding here. Published in a widely accessible format for perhaps the first time ever, it is an honor to present Silas Warner’s "Variations on Sonata in A by Mozart (K.331)":

and "The Heavens are Telling, from The Creation":

Rest in peace, Silas Warner. It’s a pleasure to hear your notes again.

UPDATE (27-Oct-14): Alternative versions of these songs are now available, courtesy Andrew Monti.

In case you haven’t already seen it on A2Central.com, Engadget, TUAW, or Make, I’ll do my bit to spread the word: Jason Torchinsky is assembling Los Angeles-based Apple II users into an orchestra, with their beloved retrocomputers as the sole instrument. Their debut concert will be in just two days, at 8 PM on June 25. How much more impressive this performance might be than the works of established chiptune musicians such as 8 Bit Weapon is to be determined, but audience members can judge for themselves by watching a live stream of the proceedings, or the tape-delayed recording of same.

What hasn’t been reported elsewhere is that this effort will be reproduced next month in Minnesota, at the Walker Art Center of Minneapolis. If you miss this opportunity to participate in a live concert of Apple II hardware, you’ll get another chance soon.

Finally, the image that the Machine Project is using to promote this event? That’s from an advertisement for the ALF Music Card. The featured guitarist is Bill Fickas, who found this blog a few months back and emailed me the details behind that photo. Now that’s a full-fledged interview waiting to happen!

I ended a recent blog post by asking, "Will the Apple II ever have its own music video?" Although not quite what I had in mind, there’s actually been an Apple II music video for nearly three decades. It was released in April of 1984 as part of Apple’s official "Apple II Forever" event.

I suddenly feel the need to wear a stuffy suit and shake people’s hands over a keyboard.

Perhaps better known is the song "Apple II Forever" a song released on the disc Developer Helper Volume 1: Phil And Dave’s Excellent CD (with the titular Dave being David Szetela, KansasFest 2007 keynote speaker). It’s been set to slides and published as this music video:

Is a thirty-year hiatus from the music scene enough? How can we build on this sterling record to create what’s sure to be the next Apple II chartbuster?

(Hat tips to Steven Sande and Steve Weyhrich)

Depending on your definition, computers have been around much longer than the Apple II. For example, Charles Babbage’s analytical engine was documented in 1837, demonstrating a mechanical means of computing and converting data.

But such devices weren’t always so pragmatic; starting in the late 19th century and peaking in 1924, another sort of computer was the player piano. By “reading” a spool of paper, the machine could interpret the data encoded onto those sheets and translate it into aural tones.

Although player pianos have waned in popularity, there was a brief period in which their manufacture was aided by the Apple II, itself a musical machine. This video shows an Apple II being used to create spools of music for player pianos:

(Hat tip to IonFarmer)