Funny story, right around the time the first one was published(a bit after but I didn't know about it), I was at my first job and I was tasked with doing a bunch of drivers for fiscal printers for linux. Saying that their documentation was crap would be a huge understatement. I.e:
0x4e -> next
0x03 -> cursor
And around 2 pages of addresses and single word descriptions. That was it. It took me 2 months of non-stop brute forcing to figure them out but eventually I figured them out. One of the things they could do is play sound and the test to check if they work when the technicians were installing them was to play the imperial march. When I showed it to the technicians, one of them said "Oh, you copied the floppy drive guy?"
I had no idea what he was talking about until he showed me. Lesson learned: it's the internet, you are never the first.
One little known feature of linux is that there are ANSI sequences you can send to the console that turn off and off the PC buzzer and alter the frequency.
One innocent use I used for this once was when I set up an on-demand modem system using ISDN for the office. If it detected a packet for off-site, it'd start the modem dialing and when the link was up, it'd make a series of ascending tones and after a minute or so of inactivity, it'd take down the link and play some descending tones. People tried not to use the internet unless they heard the ascending tones, so we only used a couple of hours of dial-up per day.
One not so innocent use for this was trolling the phone engineers who were tasked with installing something in the rack in the corner of the office. Every time they went round the back of the rack and touched anything, I'd make one of the servers beep, but always a different one and only when they touched a wire. Occasionally I also ejected and then tried to mount the CDROM, so they'd just hear a thud every now and then too. They literally had no idea what was going on and got quite paranoid every time they went to touch anything.
And get to one of their live shows if you can! I recently saw them in Helsinki, great club show. Live guitars and drums and lots of retro tech on stage
Managed to see them in London a few months back, can definitely echo the recommendation! (The warm up act could have done with a sound check but I was very impressed with his playing an OG GameBoy as a MIDI controller)
I wondered what happened to it. The YouTube channel used do be quite active, with a new song about every month, but it has definitely slowed down since the Floppotron 3.0, and the last update is now nearly 2 years old.
Only 8 songs have been released on the Floppotron 3.0, compared to about a hundred on the 2.0, why so much effort designing and building such a machine not to use it and also make money?
Or maybe, and that's actually what I am interested in, is it featured anywhere else? Live performances? Collab albums? etc...
When CP/M was still a viable choice to run on an x86 machine, variable speed 5.25" floppy drives were still a thing. They were quite musical simply loading your executables. I believe the idea was constant linear velocity recording was "better" than constant angular velocity, by virtue of right-sizing the recording density across the entire surface.
This uses the stepper motor for the read head, as the source of the vibe. Different, but also very fine. I've only heard the star wars imperial march which felt entirely fitting for the instrument.
> I believe the idea was constant linear velocity recording was "better" than constant angular velocity, by virtue of right-sizing the recording density across the entire surface.
Yeah. If you think about it, the outer sectors on a disk rotating with constant speed are flying under the head much faster than the inner ones. So the slow inner sectors basically decide what magnetic density your disk has to have, as the bits will end up really close together there! But the disk will have the same magnetic density on the outer sectors, over a much longer distance. This will go wasted, if your drive reads the bits at the same constant speed (because the gaps between the bits are much larger, meaning you don’t get to use that high density).
Drivers like the C64’s 1541 employed workarounds like still keeping a constant rotational speed (300RPM for the 1541), but divide the tracks into 4 different “speed zones”, which determine at what speed the bits are read off the disk.
So, on the outer tracks the bits are read off faster, and there are actually more sectors than on the inner tracks.
There is also the amazing Franzoli Electronics with his tesla coil music. Great selection of tracks. from AC/DC - Thunderstruck to Megalovania - Undertale OST, you'll find something you like: https://youtu.be/99aLrgk-uqs
0x4e -> next
0x03 -> cursor
And around 2 pages of addresses and single word descriptions. That was it. It took me 2 months of non-stop brute forcing to figure them out but eventually I figured them out. One of the things they could do is play sound and the test to check if they work when the technicians were installing them was to play the imperial march. When I showed it to the technicians, one of them said "Oh, you copied the floppy drive guy?"
I had no idea what he was talking about until he showed me. Lesson learned: it's the internet, you are never the first.
But damn, this is impressive.