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: ... 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.