Apple II Audio and the Mockingboard | Hacker News Reader

Apple II Audio and the Mockingboard

nicole.express

50 pointszdw12 comments

The Mockingboard is a wonderful piece of hardware and it's great to see them still being produced today. They're even available in kit form if you'd like to solder it together yourself (it's all through mount, nothing difficult).

I will note, however, that it's not just that the card doesn't ship with the speech chips (SSI-263P) - no one has made them in a very long time, and they're essentially impossible to find (and very expensive if you do).

Finally, if you're going to dust off an old Apple device and fire it up, I would seriously recommend rebuilding the power supply - capacitors don't last forever, and they can do unfortunate things when they fail.

> rebuilding the power supply

Any links or info on how to do this?

> no one has made them in a very long time, and they're essentially impossible to find

That’s too bad. Do you know any software that actually used them anyway?

Regarding the built in speaker, I have a disk called AppleRock ‘83 that has 4 or 5 sampled songs (Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, ZZ Top, etc). Plays through the speaker, no mockingbird. The audio is amazing.

Mostly it's the Capacitors that go bad. Adrian's Digital Basement has some videos on resurrecting old 8bit apple computers. here's a good playlist to start. He starts talking about the power supply around the 26 min mark. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTkX7rkq_Kk&list=PL4tFqFVNf5...

I bought power supply rebuild kits from Reactive Micro[1] for my IIe and IIgs. I paid a lot more than just recapping the existing power supply, for sure, but it was dead easy to install.

[1] https://www.reactivemicro.com/product/universal-psu-kit/

Some well-sampled straight-from-the-speaker Apple ][ sound:

https://youtu.be/oo46kKaHA3E?t=27

Of course, almost nothing sounded like that

Back in the late 80s I wrote a simple sampler for my old Apple][+ that used input from the tape port to tell the speaker when to click. Playing an audio tape at very high volume produced sort-of recognizable sound from the Apple. I never managed to get it to sound as good as some of the game intros of the day though.

The wonderful "Inside the Apple IIe" by Gary Little (https://archive.org/stream/InsideTheAppleIIe) has a program to digitize audio from the cassette port on the Apple IIe. It's an excellent demonstration of the versatility of the hardware and something I'd recommend to anybody who has a physical Apple IIe to play with.

Thanks! Can’t wait to try this. Meanwhile I have to post a YouTube video of AppleRock. I don’t see it archived.

Looking through that book, it’s not easy to find the demo you’re talking about without a hard copy. Do you have any idea which chapter might have it?

The book is great (wish I had access in 1987) and the demo starts on page 323 (#342 in the pdf)[0]. To find it quickly I used a long-forgotten arcane technique that was once known as looking-it-up-in-the-index.

[0] https://archive.org/details/InsideTheAppleIIe/page/n341/mode...

Very enjoyable even though I guess I would not build an apple 2. Did building a 6502 with 6522. Wonder whether this could fit in the next stage of that project.

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