Altair32 Emulator "Easter Egg" idea

[Cini, Richard]

Tha Altair32 Emulator uses sounds for feedback (all disable-able) for the
switch clicks, drive door, disk head movement (load/unload/step) and system
fan spin-up, run, and spin-down. And, no, I don't run the fan noise for the
whole time :-)

I have some of the same problems as Jim in that the sounds disappeared on my
development machine (Windows 2000 and Visual Studio .NET 2003) when I
upgraded from Visual Studio 6 to .NET. I believe that the sounds work on
machines other than mine, though.

Oddly enough, every once in a while, the sounds will appear, but only
briefly, before disappearing again.


-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org
[mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org]On Behalf Of Jim Battle
Sent: Friday, March 04, 2005 1:39 PM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Re: Altair32 Emulator "Easter Egg" idea


John Foust wrote:
...
> I've always thought that emulators should come with much more familiar
> sound effects, like the sounds of keyboards, disk drive doors
> opening and closing, floppy steppers engaging, fans, tapes turning, etc.  
> That's all part of the memory we're savoring and preserving, no?

My Sol-20 emulator has sound effects.  There fan startup and running 
noise, the floppy disk door opening and closing, floppy disk head 
stepping, floppy motor start and stop, and disk friction noise.  Since 
the real keyboard makes enough noise on its own I don't see what would 
be added by having fake keyboard noise too.

http://www.thebattles.net/sol20/solace/solace.html

When I recorded the sounds I first used a dynamic microphone but the 
coil picked up more RF hum than anything else.  An electret mic fixed 
that problem.  It took a while to splice the fan sounds so they would 
loop nicely.  The head stepping sound is of it stepping one track, but 
it does a fairly good job even when there is fast head stepping.

One other thing I have done is to emulate the music card -- just a 
single pole RC lowpass filter hooked up to the S-100 INT* line.  The 
"MUSIC" program would take a score and compile it into a program to 
toggle the INT line to produce polyphonic music -- although the notes 
aren't very well tempered as they get higher in frequency.  It is pretty 
impressive that it works as well as it does:

http://www.thebattles.net/sol20/d-minor.mp3

I recently upgraded PC's and now my own emulator doesn't run right and 
the sound comes out only when I'm using the debugger.  I guess it is 
about to time spin a revision on the emulator.