NFO File
Introducing the
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***********************************************
* Introducing the iLisa *
* A cmucc Production *
* Presented at Assembly 2012 - August 4, 2012 *
* 1st place winner, Real wild compo *
***********************************************
This is cmucc's third demo, and our second production for the Lisa. After
last year's fun and games failed to inspire more demoscene awesomeness for
the Lisa, we decided to do it again ourselves. Even though we swore we
never would. Seriously this time, though: never again.
The biggest complaint we received last time was that our music could use
"a little improvement." So we took the liberty of designing and building
a sound card for the Lisa's add-in bus that is approximately equivalent
to a Soundblaster 16, the "Voice of Lisa."
What You Need
=============
* You can watch this demo on a real Lisa, or on a patched version of LisaEm
that we'll be making available on our website. (The patch is necessary
because LisaEm has several bugs which prevent our demo from working.)
* You won't get the music without the "Voice of Lisa" OPL3-based
sound card (currently not generally available, but we plan on releasing
the design, and perhaps making a very small production run).
However, the demo *will* still run without it!
* Once again there's some color at the end that obviously won't display on
the Lisa's black and white CRT. To view that, you'd need a duplicate of
our FPGA-based DVI conversion setup that interprets the Lisa's contrast
setting as a color palette. We're still working on developing the DVI
system for public use, we promise.
* The Lisa Programmer's Workshop installed on a bootable Lisa hard disk
(such as a ProFile/Widget, or the aftermarket X/ProFile or IDEfile).
Instructions
============
1. The demo is available as four Apple Disk Copy 4.2 images. These can
either be used directly with LisaEm, or made into floppies by an old
68k or PPC Mac with an internal floppy drive. If you use a Mac to make
floppies, you *must* use Disk Copy 4.2. Newer versions do not properly
write Lisa floppies.
2. You will need the filejoin program that comes with the Programmer's
Workshop. If it is not installed on your hard disk, you can copy it
off of Programmer's Workshop disk 7.
3. On the Lisa, boot the Programmer's Workshop. Type "r" to run a
program, enter "filejoin" and press enter. Type "n" to indicate to
you will not be joining a .TEXT file. Specify "-#13-ilisa.dat.obj"
(changing the #13 to the proper device number for your floppy drive as
necessary) as the infile. You may specify any catalog on any device as
the outfile, as long as the filename is "ilisa.dat.obj". For example,
we would specify "-#12-ilisa.dat.obj" to create the outfile on our
Lisa 2's internal hard disk.
4. The filejoin program will start combining data from the floppies into
a file on the hard disk. When the program prompts whether you have
another disk, type "y" until you've read the data from the fourth
floppy disk.
5. Finally, you can copy the demo executable onto the hard disk. From the
Programmer's Workshop main menu, type "f" to get to the file manager
menu. Then copy "ilisa.obj" from the fourth floppy to the hard disk.
6. Once you have the demo files transferred onto the Lisa's hard disk, type
"r" at the main menu. Input the demo filename ("ilisa.obj") and then
press enter. The screen will go blank for a bit while the demo loads,
and then the demo will start.
About the Voice of Lisa
=======================
The Voice of Lisa is a custom sound card conforming to the Lisa add-in bus
specification. It contains:
* Yamaha OPL-3 synthesizer chip
* 16-bit stereo DAC for PCM
* 512kbyte SRAM for samples
* Altera MAX II CPLD for glue logic and sample playback control
* software-controlled hardware volume control (digital potentiometer)
Resulting capabilities:
Two-channel fixed sample rate stereo PCM with software-variable mixing
that is hardware-mixed with 18 OPL-3 synthesizer channels.
The hardware was designed from scratch by mdille3. Heroic CPLD programming
and creation of a MIDI interface for ease of composition by kbare. Further
impressive tweaking and awesome music by coda.
Cards will either be available for purchase or the schematics/CPLD-binary
released in the near future. Contact us if you're dying to have one.
Note that assembling this is *not* a beginner project!
Potentially inobvious cool stuff about this demo
================================================
A lot of firsts and insane hacks underlie this project that may not be obvious
unless mentioned explicitly. Some of these include:
* Fitting ~15s of video and playing it back live on a machine from 1983
* Reverse engineering the pre-HFS filesystem to rapidly transfer large files
* A live block-loader for in-demo hard disk loading of data components
* Largest demo binary that fits on unmodified original hardware from early 80s?
* A highly functional sound card attaching seamlessly to unmodified original
hardware
Thanks to everyone who helped out with this crazy project. We do this for the
ridiculous hackery, not because we're any good at demo-writing.
Credits
=======
Art
lroop
mdille3
scgruber
uG/bG Staff
Code
awesie
kbare
mdille3
mkasick
tylerni7
Hardware
kbare
lroop
mdille3
Music
coda
kbare
Rick Astley
Greets To
=========
farbrausch
C-jeff
lft
luis
fairlight
future crew
tbl
conspiracy
krue
fta
ninjaforce
asd