I remember feeling that one of the coolest things about my Apple IIe setup back in 1986 was the 6-voice sound card with which I outfitted it. The Apple II line (aside from the IIGS with it’s superb Ensoniq DOC audio chip) featured only a simple, 1-bit beeper which provided rather basic sound effects for games and did not allow for any sort of in-game score; a true theme song track, quality aside, would take too much CPU time. And, while there were a number of speech synthesizer cards available for the system at the time, few offered musical capabilities. Of those that did, Sweet Micro Systems’ Mockingboard was the king.
The Mockingboard was available in several configurations. The base unit, the Mockingboard A, was a card that featured two General Instruments AY-3-8910 audio chips, each offering three FM voices along with one white-noise generator. This chip, or nearly identical variations, was widely used in computers of the ’80s such as the MSX machines, Atari ST, ZX Spectrum 128, BBC Micro, Intellivision, Colecovision, and IBM PCjr. It provided decent simple waveform music and could be hacked to deliver low-quality digital sound samples. The board I owned was a Mockingboard C, featuring the two AYs as well as a Votrax SSI-263 speech chip.
After (re)acquiring an Apple IIe setup a few years back, I began searching for a Mockingboard to slot in, but was having no luck when I ran across what has become colloquially known as a Mockingboard K — a Korean-made clone board. So, I grabbed one from eBay and began to relive some nice memories. What I didn’t expect was that the Mockingboard’s killer app would come in 2015.
Apple II scenedemo coders French Touch [ English translation ] have recently released a disk, for the 128K Apple IIe equipped with a Mockingboard, entitled (NOT SO) Cheap Tunes (a play on the term “chiptunes“). It contains a selection of notable Atari ST game and scenedemo tracks, in a massaged file format, composed for the ST’s Yamaha YM2149F sound chip, a variant of the GI AY-3-8910. Along with these tracks is a player app that utilizes the Mockingboard’s two sound chips to play the bundled ST tracks in a sort of pseudo-stereo achieved by alternating sound chips with every screen refresh during playback. And the results sound impressive — significantly better than the tracks playing back on a native, monophonic Atari ST. (My Apple IIe and Atari 520ST happen to share the same desk in the Byte Cellar.)