Star Wars music played by a floppy drive

I can't find any documentation for this, nor can I help posting it.

I assume it's a hardware hack that manually controls the floppy drive's stepper motor, but it'd make my day if this was done in software using standard I/O requests. Either way, the 3.5 inch FDD finally serves an important function again.

Star Wars Floppy Disk

Posted by Jason Striegel | Jun 8, 2008 06:50 PM
Hardware, Music, PCs | Permalink | Comments (11) Bookmark and Share

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Posted by: Nosey Nick on June 22, 2008 at 9:09 AM

Big deal...

My Amiga was doing this in the late 1980s, what's the big deal? Is this just yet more evidence that the Amiga was decades ahead of the rest?


Posted by: Hiddensoul on June 23, 2008 at 5:19 PM

And the commodore 64 was doing it before the amiga


Posted by: John Wesley on June 24, 2008 at 1:45 PM

geeilovelavalamps.blogspot.com

Are you guys really starting a commodore-amiga flame war? Sheesh...


Posted by: garga l on June 24, 2008 at 4:57 PM

fake!

totally photoshopped! obbiously!


Posted by: TyLLy_4 on June 24, 2008 at 10:36 PM

orly?

You can't seriously be that stupid garga.

If anything they just taped the sound over the video or somthing ....

let me guess

"This looks shopped, i can tell from some of the pixels in the screen and seen quite a few fotochopz in my time"

LAWL

Great post

you have been stumbled upon, you have been liked upon


Posted by: trace on June 25, 2008 at 1:02 PM

@TyLLy_4

Haha.
You can't seriously be that stupid TyLLy_4.

The "OMG FAKE PHOTOSHOPPED THE REFLECTIONS ARE WRONG!" is one of the most common joke comments period.

(See: http://xkcd.com/331/)


Posted by: Scot on June 26, 2008 at 11:40 PM

That's Bigfoot's floppy. I want to believe.


Posted by: Malcolm Harnden on June 29, 2008 at 7:48 AM

Mr

Yep my Miggy was doing this an other tunes, it never broke the floppy but certainly annoyed my brother.


Posted by: arleas on July 6, 2008 at 10:20 PM

C64 FTW

I wouldn't say it's a flame war. But it's true. They developed a way for the Commodore 1541 drive to do this long before the Amiga drives would do it.

They always put the warning "Don't do this too often in case it breaks your drive!". I've also heard people use printer motors in a similar fashion.

All you have to do is figure out which commands to send to the drive to get the note you want and then put all the commands in sequence. I think it was probably more tricky on the commodore 64 because the 1541 had its own motherboard and processor.

google "1541 stepper motor music" and you'll see what I'm talking about though...


Posted by: James M on July 7, 2008 at 9:49 AM

Stepper motor music

He is right, try google for "stepper motor music"

Or try the following link
http://www.truveo.com/ScanJet-Scanner-playing-Fur-Elise/id/1248078264


Posted by: Upshaw on August 4, 2008 at 9:40 PM

And printers did it way earlier than that...

While figuring out how to do bitmapped graphics on my old 8-pin dot-matrix printer attached to an AppleII I realized how musical it was. Ended up removing the print ribbon, and hanging the paper from the ceiling to act as the soundboard. All done in BASIC. :)


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