4 Mar
2005
4 Mar
'05
10:38 a.m.
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.