Amiga floppy drive motor music

[Hobby331]

That's quiet amazing to program a motor controller to make the motor play. I assume that's what you did.

[wschnabel1987]

what is an amiga : P

[NuMoominba]

One of many reasons to own an Amiga.

[TheSwanies]

I'm kinda a kid that is into retro stuff... Do you have a floppy image of the program?

[SANCTIONTRAP]

i still have my commodore 64,,,,,,lol,,,,,,,and an atari,,,,ping pong was the best game evar.

[sammymarlo]

Was this from a game? It sounds like the music used in Circus Games. Or was it a demo?

[LBcoyote]

@sammymarlo No. This is just a small floppy motor music player program I wrote in the early 1990s. It was never released in any product. (Music itself was composed by Johann Strauss Jr., if I am not wrong.)

[hahaahahahaahaha]

@sammymarlo it was in roller coaster tycoon, lol

[rockerh4cker]

Ilyen Amiga meghajtót nekem is be kell szereznem xD

Great!

[ivanoblu]

No news for us! Ther's nothing that AMIGA can't do!

[LOLZpersonok]

That is awesome!

[MorbidVideoProd]

did all the machines sound like that? l can't remember mine.

[LBcoyote]

@MorbidVideoProd

I'm not sure that I understand what exactly you want to ask me... Normally, Amiga computers have 4 channel stereo sound. This on the other hand is sort of a programming hack to get sound from the floppy drive by frequently moving magnetic head back and forward.

[MorbidVideoProd]

@LBcoyote l was wondering if it was some kind of hack, and so it seems, thank you.

[fuckmail2]

which music is this?

[bpmagruder]

Nice Amiga Commodore! I'm planning to see more of these historical computers.

[HaquinusDeGothia]

Great work... it would be awesome though if someone could make it play the "Druid 2" tune (featured in several Fairlight cracktros) :)

[erikals2]

I didn't know a floppy drive could play one of the songs in RCT2 (my fave game of all time)

[ruskythegreat]

I remember drive music back in the day!

Thanks for the nostalgia trip!

[LBcoyote]

My pleasure. ;-)

[shalroth]

Did your 'Paula' chip fail??

[LBcoyote]

:-D

LOL

Good one!

[bendibell]

Hmmm.... I think the Linux kernel has enough control of the hardware to do that. Sure would be fun.

[sirinferno]

i wouldn't be suprised if it didn't; most pc floppy controllers nowadays are very very basic compared to the ones back in the days of the amgia

[bendibell]

Well, I hope it can. Hell, in kernel 2.6+ I can hot swap my PS/2 keyboard and mouse!

[meto402]

lol

[commodore256]

LOAD "*" ,8,1

[rourin]

A fun trick that came with some demo discs back in the day. Just be cautious. You don't wanna ruin the stepmotor in that floppy drive, do you? ;)

[LBcoyote]

I did not use the step motor which moves the head like El Condor Pasa song you might heard on Amiga drive, or Star Wars theme on pc floppy drive.

Instead I used the motor that spins the disk. Hardly something that might get broken by turning it on and off...

[FUSER2K07]

indeed :)

[Chukkz2]

I once got a virus on a disk that would turn the screen to the german flag and play the national anthem... took me several seconds to figure WHERE the music actually was coming from... I never switched the power off so quickly. XD

[tbsys31061]

@Chukkz2

xD nice virus loll ymmd

[anss321]

Neat trick. Would have been awesome as a prank boot virus and along with a flashing Beethoven will now destroy your floppy drive! message would have had me lunging for the power cord, pulling the wrong ones first, while flailing my arms and praying to the floppy drive god (I know from experience that I wont simply press the power button, Im useless in a panic). Hmm. Thanks for just making a youtube video out of this instead.

[LBcoyote]

:-)

I actually had an idea to play an audio sample on floppy drive which would say "the devil possessed your amiga", but didn't have any means to record the voice at that time.

Btw, the music is by Strauss not Beethoven... ;-)

[anss321]

That would have been positively evil. If my floppy started speaking I'd piss myself and question my sanity. Hell, I was floored the first time I heard my Gameboy yell "cowabunga".

[Phlebiax]

The track you hear is from Edelweiss.

[Jourei91]

How exactly did you manage to get your hands on that drive?

No need to answer if you physically modded it...

[LBcoyote]

The drive is not modded in any way. Btw, I tried my program on several stock amigas (500 and 2000) and they all behaved the same.

I remember one friend that had A2000 with some green monochrome monitor and without speakers. I was showing him my intros and when the drive player was to be loaded I said him to hush because there is some quiet music to be heard from his amiga. He said no, no, there are no speakers. I just said him to listen carefully. He was truly amazed when he heard the music! ;-)

[Jourei91]

Does/can your program work on a pc? :P

[LBcoyote]

I am not sure. This technique might be feasible, but if so it won't be easy because you must access the floppy drive controller at the lowest level. (anyone, fell free to correct me if I am wrong...)

Usually (in the DOS days) you would use BIOS call to read something from the floppy. However, there is one guy that wrote alternative floppy driver for Windows 2000 and higher. If anyone knows how to turn the motor on and off it is him. The guy's name is Simon Owen, and the driver is fdrawcmd.sys.

[Lachlant1984]

That can't be good for the motor, do you need to run the motor at a very high speed to get that sound? Does the drive still work after you did that to it? It sounds as if the music is coming from a speaker inside the computer, but of course the Amiga 500 didn't even have an internal dpeaker. How exactly do you do what you did there?

[LBcoyote]

Spin motor works only at one speed. What I do is turn it on and off frequently and this produces sound. Essentially I use it as a simple 1-bit beeper. Read my comments to Outlander999 below to learn how I come up with the idea.

And yes, after all these years the floppy drive still works perfectly normal. ;-)

[Outlander999]

Man, you must be mad XD

great idea!

[LBcoyote]

When I was just a kid, years before I got my first computer (ZX Spectrum), I played with small electric motor and I tried to connect it to the headphones line of a cassette player to see what would happen. Well, the music could be heard.

Later I worked on multichannel sound players for ZX Spectrum so I got into the one bit sound.

Finally, when I got the Amiga I used the same approach on it's floppy. I used the spin motor because the head is slow. (head is perfect for the Star Wars theme though!)

[Outlander999]

:)

but is it dangerous for the mechanism of the floppy?

[LBcoyote]

With my approach I guess not.

Moving the head is much more stressful for the mechanism than turning on and off the rotation of the floppy. And with the spin motor you can get real high frequencies and nice clean sound. The only downside is that the sound is relatively quiet.

While with the head stepper motor music I've heard stories of broken drives!

[AmigaRipperMOD]

Wish I could do the same to my A500...it's still working, btw ;-)

[subrealms]

Of course it's still working, it's an A500 :)

[brainpotter]

awesome that is

[Anthony96922]

22 seconds youcould see some thingy

[Alex28null1]

how does it work? can you give me the name of the programm?

MFg Alex

[LBcoyote]

It works by turning on and off the spin motor of the floppy so the motor acts as a speaker. Unfortunately, the program I wrote works only on A500 because it is written without timers - the tone frequency is controlled by a simple processor loop. Therefore it won't work on A1200 for example because of different processor execution timing.

[SilverWolfz7]

I want to do that!

[mickjt84]

Cool