Moving on from our last post, here’s one of the alphaSyntauri demo songs. This is quite a bit more ambitious in terms of multitimbrality than the MCMS samples I posted yesterday, and really shows how far ahead of its time the hardware was in 1980.

Skip the video to 1:34 to ignore the bootup sequence and get right to the tunes.

MESS’s Apple II emulation gets another “world’s first” notch with incoming support for the Mountain Computer Music System (MCMS for short). The MCMS was designed in 1979 and consisted of two boards that had to go in adjacent slots with a ribbon cable between them. It provided 16 8-bit wavetable voices, with 8 permanently assigned to each of the two stereo channels. The wavetables consisted of 256 bytes of 8-bit samples, and were DMAed from the Apple II’s memory. The boards also provided a light pen interface and a source of 125 Hz interrupts for stable timing.

Two companies built complete hardware/software synthesizer systems around these boards: Passport, with their SoundChaser, and Syntauri Corp. with their alphaSyntauri. Both systems added an interface card to connect a synthesizer keyboard to the Apple II as well as software to create and edit sounds and songs.

Here’s a demonstration of the first working version of the emulation. The current code sounds cleaner than this example and doesn’t clip/distort on the MH ROCK song, but you can get the idea of some of the sounds this thing could do (additional demos with more sounds coming soon).