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Electric Duet Video Jukebox for the Mockingboard and the Cricket! - X-Mas Edition - Introduction ============ This is the Video Jukebox included on side A of Softdisk Issue 49. It uses the Electric Duet (ED) music player by Paul Lutus and Softdisk’s pack and unpack routines to display HGR pictures while playing tunes. About the Mockingboard Version ============================== The Electric Duet is probably the most popular music format in the Apple II world and was used in almost every Softdisk Issue to play some background music. Unfortunately the sound quality of the internal speaker of the Apple II does not do much justice to the song pieces written with ED. On certain Apple II models like the //c the sound circuitry does not cut off the modulation frequency very well producing a high pitched background noise. This motivated me to write my own routines to play ED songs using a sound card to produce pure tones with much higher quality. I chose the Cricket! because I own one and there is not much software compatible with it. The Mockingboard ED Player was developed on an emulator but seems to sound just as well. I wanted to keep the player as small as the original one so that it could be handled the same way. This limited a bit the amount of code that I could use, so even though the Cricket! version is able to play in stereo, the Mockingboard version is not. Song format ============ The Video Jukebox was included in the Christmas Issue of Softdisk so some Christmas Songs were included with it. I put some additional christmas songs from side A of Softdisk Issue 25 but the jukebox could be used with any other Electric Duet tune as long as its filename begins with M and a period. Picture format =============== The pictures are packed HGR screen dumps. If you want Video Jukebox to display your own you will have to pack them with the included PACK routine and rename them so that they start with P and a period. Included in the disk is a packer utility to help you pack your own pictures. Using the Packer Utility ======================== The utility expects your unpacked pictures to end with .PIC as filename extension. Use the RENAME command in case your picture does not have the proper extension. Start the utility by typing RUN PACKER UTILITY - Toggle to normal mode by pressing the N key. - Load your picture by pressing the L key. - Enter the filename of the picture you want to pack without the .PIC extension. - The picture will be displayed. - Toggle to packed mode by pressing the N key. - Save the packed picture with the S key. - Enter the picture name starting with P and a period. The file P.YOURPICTURE.PAC will be saved to disk. The Jukebox will recognize it automatically and display it while playing the tunes. Credits ======= Paul Lutus - original Electric Duet music player Jim Black - Video Jukebox Paul Pritchar - Packer Utility Dave Holle - PACK/UNPACK Routine Mario Patino - The Cricket! and Mockingboard ED player