Spam Spam Spam Humbug 141 – Nox Archaist Does Impossible Things With the Apple ][
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Podcast Topic(s)
This episode is a direct follow-up to a discussion that took place toward the end of the first part of Episode 140 (The Fun Zone), and in particular is a response to some of Dr. Cat’s comments toward the end of that part of the episode. You’ll recall, hopefully, that near the end of that episode. Dr. Cat lamented the fact that the Nox Archaist team had taken him up on his advice to implement 5-bit pulse width modulated (PWM) audio in the intro screen for the game…but had only put a drum sound effect in place, whereas he had advised them to implement a spoken line of dialogue.
This week, Mark Lemmert from the Nox Archaist team rejoins the podcast to bring that story to a conclusion.
Some points that help inform the discussion:
- 5-bit PWM on an Apple ][ would allow for almost-realistic speech on the platform, which seems unthinkable.
- Castle Wolfenstein on Apple ][ was the first game that had human voices, but these were difficult to understand. The Ghostbusters game released in 1984 was another example, and again the speech was mostly unintelligible.
- As noted in Episode 140, Dr. Cat proved it was possible to do 5-bit PWM on Apple ][, but doing so consumes almost all available memory.
Dr. Cat’s suggestion intrigued the Nox Archaist team, but adding PWM to the project got off to slow start. The main difficulty in moving forward was finding someone who could code the driver and build the sound effect. Once someone was found who could do this, the decision was made to use a drum sound, which didn’t demonstrate all that 5-bit PWM could do…but it was deemed to be possible within the limited time frame that the team had.
This is where things were at when Episode 140 was recorded.
After further investigation (disk space was a particular issue), the Nox Archaist team looked again at the idea of including speech in the game’s intro screen. The heavy lifting of implementing PWM support had already been done, after all, and the programmer was open to the idea of expanding what PWM would be used for in the game. Kailef Dragon recorded a line for the team to use; it’s his voice that now booms out the game’s title when it first launches. The sound effect works well, and sounds much better than we’ve come to expect from the Apple ][ platform. But then, that’s in keeping with Nox Archaist’s mission: to extrapolate where game development on 8-bit systems would have gone from where it more or less ended when 16-bit systems came along.
Community & Patronage
As always, this episode of Spam Spam Spam Humbug is brought to you by our Patreon backers; thank you to everyone who supports Spam Spam Spam Humbug and the Ultima Codex by that means. And, as always, a hearty thank you to our co-producers: Seth, Goldenflame, Chris, Dominik, Violation, Cranberry, Helgraf, Gronkh, Pascal, and Thorwan.
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The Nox Archaist team have coaxed quite decent-sounding speech out of an Apple ][. Find out how!