Musical Apples

I am an Apple IIe user and would like to know how to program my computer to make music. Can you do it in Applesoft BASIC or do you need another language?

Denny Hays

It's a fairly simple matter to make elementary sounds on the Apple in BASIC. You can tweak the speaker by accessing location —16336 (i.e., POKE —16336,0) or ring the bell by PRINTing CHR$(7). But to do much more than this, you need a short machine language (ML) routine. Fortunately, this ML routine can be POKEd in from BASIC.

You can find such an ML routine in an article by Blaine Mathieu (COMPUTE!, October and November 1983). The tutorial explains both fundamental and complex Apple sound generation.