Phasor/mockingboard emulator for GS Ensoniq!
Mitchell Spector
software emulator for the Apple IIgs! At this moment it can directly play
song files that were accompanied with Applied Engineering's Phasor card.
Using the GS's Ensoniq chip, all Phasor/mockingboard effects such as waveform
envelopes, attack, sustain, decay and even whitenoise generators are played
back -- all 12 voices, and prefectly intact (better tonal quality and sound
than my real Phasor card, IMHO!).
..But wait, before I go on, I have a rather interesting story to this. Kind
of comparable to a story of long dead writer/artist/musician's 'unknown
missing works' that were lurking in someone's basement, only to be
rediscovered years later! Thing is, this slipped right under our noses, but
luckly I stumbled on what could turn out to be a small treasure. Read on and
I'll explain...:-)
Christmas 1993. Or just a few weeks short of it, we all groaned and
moaned (well, most of us :) as another One World Software Wizards so-called
NoiseTracker GS update hit comp.binaries.apple2 (version 1.30). Many of us
know what Dr.Tom's idea of an update is, so I'm sure the vast majority of
you ignored this posting. For some reason though, I thought I'd take a look
at it, mainly because it was supposed to contain some Christmas varition
themes and music. Of course what it turned out to be was another sector-edited
NTGS with page after rambling page of nonsense about "Cosmic OHM and AHH"(tm)
mental vibrations, 3-D virtual stereo surround and whatnot. I was about to
erase it, when I noticed a folder called "/CHRISTMAS". Inside was a ProDOS 8
SYS executable file labeled "XMAS.MINIVAMPS". So, I ran this program, and
found a synthy-sounding jubebox player with close to 30 Christmas songs.
Different, I thought, than anything else I've heard on the IIgs. Nice sounding
in a way. So I ended up keeping the disk planning to copy this player, but
delete the rest of the disk. I _knew_ Dr.Tom had stolen this from someone
and claimed it his own work, which is another reason I held onto it. Well
time passed and I hadn't touched the disk for months.
Recently however, a thread started up about the AE Phasor card for
8-bit Apple IIs. When speaking with a few people, I realized I was missing
a demo-song disk AE that used to ship with the Phasor card. I tracked one down
a few days ago and tried it out on my Phasor card (inside my Apple //e). One of
the disks contained Christmas songs -- when I went to play them, I noticed
most of these titles were very famillar, in fact, the very same songs on
the "XMAS.MINIVAMPS" player. Coincidence I thought...at least until I started
ro listen to the actual songs. They all even had the _exact_ same effects played
as the ones on the VAMPS disk! Well, to sum this up, I dug up that XMAS NTGS
disk, compared file sizes, names and structures and they were *identical* to
the songs on the AE Phasor disk! Things were starting to come together as to
what I had here. I quickly threw in some other completely different songs
from another AE Phasor disk, changed to filetype ($F5/$0000 --> INT/$BFBF) and
sure enough to my surprise, my Apple IIgs was playing songs that were only
accessible with a Phasor hardware card! No distortions, clear as could be and
all 12-voices/waveforms/etc intact!!
..So now, it seems Charles Turely got hold of a completed Phasor-emulator,
and being the brilliant one he is, hadn't the faintest clue what it was
and released this (stolen lost work) as a silly 3-D VAMPS XMAS jubebox
which everyone ignored! Dr.Tom rambles in a text file how he got the
songs from MDIdeas (yeah, right) and wrote this player to make them VAMPS
3-D whatever, but I have a feeling this was something the defunct FTA group
wrote. Whether FTA, MDIdeas, AE or whomever wrote this player, the point
remains it _does_ work and can near fully emulator a Phasor/mockingboard
card! Which now can re-open an old discussion we thought closed -- Phasor
emulation for all those old DOS 3.3 games for the ][+ and //e through the
Ensoniq DOC! Imagine being able to hear music while playing old games like
"Ultima V" or "Skyfox" -- It seems very pausible with this discovered!
Anyone open to changing this from a stand-alone player, to a mini-launcher
that would interccept Phasor calls and send them to the Ensoniq (actually,
that part is done, we just need the hooks into the software). Maybe a
modification could be written for "Dos 3.3 Launcher v2.1" to support
Phasor emulation?
All you programmers out there dig up NoiseTracker 1.30 and see what you
can do! I'd love to see what FTA (?) started, finished...! :)
Mitchell Spector
sb_...@pavo.concordia.ca / spe...@vax2.concordia.ca
Terry R. Olsen
: As the title implies, yes, I have here a Phasor music/sound card
: software emulator for the Apple IIgs! At this moment it can directly play
: song files that were accompanied with Applied Engineering's Phasor card.
Are you speaking about the ALF Music Player? It has a black screen with
horizontal lines and lo-res dots as the music is playing??? I have this
thing and it's not a Dr. Tom hacked up one either.
Tim Haynes
Mitchell Spector <spe...@vax2.concordia.ca> wrote:
>magine being able to hear music while playing old games like
>"Ultima V" or "Skyfox" -- It seems very pausible with this discovered!
Oh please... please... some IIgs Warrior please deliver us the Prize!
Tim
--
|\^/| /1 | Tim Haynes
._|\| |/|_. | ln(erf(sinh(x))) dx = -.9469659849 | Quality Assurance
\ MAPLE / /0 | Waterloo Maple Software
<_________> "The Future of Mathematics" | tha...@maplesoft.on.ca
Mitchell Spector
No, this player (written under AppleSoft) displays a static
Super-Hi-Res screen image. It came from MDIdeas as some sort of demo
to show off the SuperSonic stereo card, then Dr.Tom somehow got hold
of it and passed it off as his own work. What few people knew (if any)
is it is a Phasor song player that requires no extra hardware -- emulates
an Applied Engineering Phasor card using the GS's Ensoniq 5503 chip.
The ALF music player you described sounds identical to the music
player shipped with the AE Phasor card. ALF files can be converted and
played back through the Phasor music player, which in turn will let you
play them on a IIgs with the MDIdeas emulator. I don't think this was
ever offically finished or released, anyone who bought a MDIdeas'
SuperSonic stereo card will recall it came shipped with the "Music
Construction Set: Dealer Demo" disk -- not a XMAS song jubebox.
Here's an idea though: Why not patch the low-res AE Phasor player
to work with the IIGS MDIdeas one? (watch the animated low-res display rather
than a static screen). Both are written under AppleSoft BASIC and shouldn't
be too difficult to patch. What I really want to see is this MDIdeas program
expanded into a full-blown Phasor emulator for all those old DOS 3.3 games.
You'd have to add support hooks for _each_ program out there, but it could
still be done. I'd like to see "Ultima V" done first! :)
stanislav...@gmail.com
Antoine Vignau
I also thought of Jimmy Huey's player but you would have mentioned it because, when it deals with music, you know what you are talking about!
Antoine
Antoine Vignau
Michael 'AppleWin Debugger Dev'
I know some people love to bitch about replying to old posts (I don't) but I personally hate the opposite -- when a forum/thread gets "locked" due to some arbitrary lock-out age. As long as someone has something interesting to contribute why not allow them?
i.e.
A while back I replied to an ~20+ year old post about a Mathematician patenting two prime numbers (because it was a common search result) with the EXACT patent numbers (because no one in the thread actually mentioned them) and instantly somebody started complaining. Really? Apparently some people don't know how to ignore posts they don't find interesting?! :-)
Michael
Antoine Vignau
> Antoine, you going for the title of "King of Necro-replies" ? :-) :-) :-)
> Michael
Yes, I am that King :-(
Antoine