Re: Basic Programming Question -- Music

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

xanfan5378@hotmail.com wrote:

>I am interested in fiddling with Apple II programming again, and I was
>wondering if someone out there could help me with something...
>
>I'd like to incorporate simple music into the program, but I don't
>remember the BASIC programming commands to do such a thing. Does anyone
>know them?

There are no BASIC programming commands to generate music
unfortunately.  Not with the built in rudimentary BASIC, Applesoft.
There are advanced BASICs that do, but they come on disk.

>Also, was the Apple II limited to playing one note at a time, or could
>chords be included? (I think it was one at a time, but I may be wrong).

Which Apple II do you have?  All the Apple IIs that were 8-bit
could only play one note at a time, but you could play up to
four one note sounds very fast to end up with warbling chords.
The 16-bit Apple IIGS is far more advanced.  It has a 32-channel
Ensoniq wavetable synthesis chip.  You could access up to
32 sound generators (oscillators) at once although for simplicity
you'd use the ROM based tools Apple provided to play music
and these pair the oscillators for 16 voices, 15 of which you
can use in your programs.  Or you can access the chip directly
to use the 32-oscillators independently.  Pairing oscillators
provides for richer sound, but single oscillator music sounds
quite good to me too.

>And how difficult would it be to program speech into the program?

http://www.byteworks.org/ sells a toolset called Talking Tools.
It provides the IIGS' Ensoniq sound chip with a phoneme
generated speech system.  Whatever you time, the IIGS will
sound out.

>I know this is a lot, but if you could help me, please reply to
>xanfan5378@hotmail.com with any information you could give me.
>
>Thanks!
>Kris

Good luck.  Please post back to csa2 which Apple II model
you have so that we can provide more help.