By this point we are all familiar with [Quinn Dunki] and her awesome engineering and retro hacking. [Quinn] aims her latest blog post at the Apple IIc Plus and its tone deaf bleeping beep. You can hear it for yourself in her beep comparison video after the break.
[Quinn] gets straight into the source code as expected and works through a logical process that she explains quite nicely while looking for the origin of the problem. There are some interesting and hard to follow moves in the source as control jumps around the ROM(s) all in the name of minimizing RAM. In proper form [Quinn] uses the ROM bank switching ability to her advantage as she see’s [the Woz’s] efficiency and raises him some fancy footwork of her own along with a beep that doesn’t make our skin crawl.
This isn’t the first time we have covered [Quinn’s] work by any means, in fact we have covered her blog post on the Apple IIc Plus game pad build which is part of her series of hacks on the same machine. If you need further retro tech inspiration check out her Veronica demo at Hackaday’s 10th anniversary party.
[Bil Herd] beware, [Quinn] puts a shot across the bow of the Commodore camp.
Uhhhh…. OK.
That nostalgic original beep, though. Instantly teleported to a cold Wisconsin winter, clicking that clunky switch, hearing the beep and the floppy disk drive stutter. Load up my Applesoft BASIC programs and see if I can use the math I learned earlier that day to draw some cool geometric figures.
Something the blurb isn’t making clear is that the ][c+ beep is wrong & different,lower, from all the previous ][ series So this follows the adventure in patching the ROM to match the classic beep tone.
I misunderstood the blurb to mean she didn;t like the classic beep and decided to lower the pitch as the video seemingly demonstrated…