This is running on an Apple II but the video is from an emulator, partly
due to laziness and partly because I don't have a good setup for getting
good audio recordings.
System Requirements
Apple II. You need 64k and a Mockingboard if you want sound.
Should work on II+/IIe/IIc/IIgs (though only tested
in various emulators)
A. They were part of a collection in a mini-museum in
the basement at work. Someone new took over and tried
to throw them all out and I rescued them at the last minute.
This includes the Apple IIe, the Commodore 64, the IMSAI 8080,
and the Altair 8800.
You might also notice an SGI Octane in the
background, that was a rescue from a different event.
The Altair is completely full of memory expansion
boards, I'm not sure what it was used for back in the 80s.
The Atari 2600, dot-matrix printer, and OLPC are all things
I've acquired on my own.
Q. Why is the lyrics sync so uneven?
A. You might think I have some automated way to do this linked to
the music file, but no, it's all done by hand and pretty
slapdash. In the end this was a throw-it-together-quick
project.
After about the 50th time listening through it and adjusting hex
values slightly I just gave up and called it done.
Part of the problem is I am lazy and just reload the graphic
instead of clearing the bottom of the screen, and the decompress
takes some time so you have to start it early. Also the music
uses a variable number of lines per pattern and so it's not
always easy to just be "start 8 lines from the end of the previous
pattern" w/o unintentionally making it an invalid line and then
the whole thing stops working.
Q. Did you really have to flip over Apple II disks?
A. Yes, unlike some later systems that could read both sides
of a 5.25" floppy, the Apple II drives were one-sided
so to read the data on the other side you had to flip
it over. For data to be written to the other side
you needed to add another write-protect notch.
I actually have some unused footage of creating
this in case anyone freeze-framed the video to see if
the notch was there.
Q. No, I meant did you have to flip-over the disk for this
particular demo?
A. No, that was done for humor value. Although I do have some
demos and games that are big enough to require more
than one side.
This particular demo is relatively small, the
music+player is 7k, the loader/library is 2k and
the animation part is 16k. All of these fit fine
on a single sided disk (which on Apple II can hold 140k).
Q. Are you using text mode for the lyrics?
A. No, though in retrospect I could have. I am using some hi-res
font routines because originally I thought I'd have the
text elsewhere on the screen and maybe against a colored
background. In the end the lyrics ended up at the bottom
sort of like the text/graphics split the Apple II can do,
though if you notice the spacing is for only 3 rather than
4 lines of text. Also it lets me have lowercase even on
an Apple II+. I'm not sure if using text mode would have
been easier since I am doing page flipping so I'd
have to manage both text and graphics pages.
Q. The lyrics are great, but could use better phrasing
to fit the music better?
A. Yes, I struggled a lot with this. Part of the issue
is the actual lyrics to the song don't always quite
match the music. I'm sure there must be a term for that,
but I guess a good enough singer can pull it off.
I still am not satisfied with the knight part, I tried
various variation of blue knight / this blue knight, etc.
And if I had to do it again I might have the first part
be "Hurry, Trogdor's waiting there for you".
Was also debating the take care of the baby part.
Maybe "it's the least you could do" instead?
Also not sure how the original Serengeti part worked
for anyone.
Q. Wow, this is like the old internet! Why?
A. Because I am old. And set in my ways.
Development Notes
V1.0 notes -- 3 January 2026
Finally got this released. Was mainly just going for the rain effect.
Then decided to go for this but wasn't able to find a good tracked
version of Africa by Toto (if there's an existing MOD or PT3 it makes
this a lot easier) so had to slowly transcribe it from sheet music.
