The Mockingboard

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The Apple II has a speaker and nothing else: a program makes sound by clicking it, one click at a time, and has no time left for anything else while it does. Sweet Micro Systems’ Mockingboard was a card that gave it sound chips of its own, General Instrument sound generators of three voices each, that play tones and noise while the program goes on with the game. Games with music and effects for it, Ultima among them, made it the sound card of the Apple II.

Each card came with a demonstration disk. This page starts the one of the Mockingboard Sound/Speech I, and listens to its sound effects.

What you need

Mockingboard_Sound_and_Speech_I_Demo_Disk_Apple_II_Plus_Sweet_Micro_Systems_1982.dsk, the Mockingboard Sound and Speech I Demo Disk of 1982, from the Internet Archive. ./fetch-disks.sh in this repository downloads it into disks/.

The documents of the Mockingboard are on the Internet Archive.

The machine

An Apple ][+ with a Mockingboard:

• the 6502 processor at 1 MHz, 48 KB of memory, and Applesoft BASIC in its ROM;
• the keyboard of the ][+, which types only capitals;
• a Mockingboard in slot 4, with two sound generators of three voices each, and no speech chip;
• a Disk II controller card in slot 6, with the demonstration disk in drive 1.

izapple2 -model none -board 2plus -cpu 6502 -screen color \
    -rom "<internal>/Apple2_Plus.rom" \
    -charrom "<internal>/Apple2rev7CharGen.rom" -forceCaps \
    -s4 mockingboard \
    -s6 diskii,disk1=disks/Mockingboard_Sound_and_Speech_I_Demo_Disk_Apple_II_Plus_Sweet_Micro_Systems_1982.dsk

The model 2plus of izapple2 has this machine, with a Language Card and a Videx Videoterm 80 column card more:

izapple2 -model 2plus -screen color -s4 mockingboard disks/Mockingboard_Sound_and_Speech_I_Demo_Disk_Apple_II_Plus_Sweet_Micro_Systems_1982.dsk

Start it

1. Start izapple2 with the command above. The disk loads its programs and draws its title, a few lines at a time.

   

2. Wait for the main menu. Each letter is a demonstration.

   

   The speech demonstration needs the speech chip of the Sound/Speech I, which the Mockingboard of izapple2 does not have.

Sound effects

1. Press A for the sound effects. Each letter plays one.

   

2. Press A, B, D, E and K, the gunshot, the machine gun, the helicopter, the explosion and the laser, waiting a little after each.

   🔊 Listen to them, as izapple2 played them: the five, three seconds apart.

   A sound starts when its key is pressed and the menu is back at once, while it plays: the program only tells the chips what to play, and they play it on their own. Press Escape to go back to the main menu.

What next

A game in Applesoft has a game with no sound at all: the speaker is all an Apple II without a card has.