Simon Williams wrote:

>FYI I'm using a //e and //c. Seems like they're fairly
>interchangeable, though the //e has a much richer tone (haha).
>Preliminary results are quite promising, though I can't save anything
>with my disk drive being shot.  Is it worth trying to use the tape
>in/outs (I seem to recall it was a pain in the arse with the trs80 at
>least).

In that case, the "any key down" approach will probably produce
better results.

BTW, with the //c, you can bypass the tiny internal speaker easily
by plugging in headphones or external powered speakers--that will
improve the sound quality tremendously.

For some fun, try out my software analog-to-digital converter
for sampled sounds.  It's available on my web site as the
program "SOUND.EDITOR".  It plays 11.025KHz sampled
sounds with 5-bit accuracy and 2x oversampling (so the
22KHz "carrier" is essentially inaudible).  The sound editor
is a nice demo program for the sound player, and permits
8-bit Apples to do some nice manipulations of sampled
sound, as well as implementing 2:1 ADPCM compression.

This technique is capable of reproducing virtually any sound
on an 8-bit Apple with pretty good fidelity (5-bit, 11.025KHz--
about as good as most AM radios).  Put another way, the
sound reproduction quality is good enough that you should
use external speakers or headphones to really appreciate it.

The biggest limitation of the sampled sound technique is
that each second of sound requires 11KB of RAM, so the
sounds that can be easily played and edited are rather
short.  (OTOH, sounds to be associated with game or program
"events" _should_ be short, to avoid becoming boring!  ;-)

The player has been integrated (by others) into games,
to provide entertaining and realistic sound effects.

Source code for the player and the compression routines
is provided for those who want to modify or study them.

-michael

 Email:  mjmahon@aol.com
 Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/