PT3_Player Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Will this play on any Apple II?

A. Yes, though you need a Mockingboard in Slot 4 to hear the music.

	You probably need 48k of RAM too.


Q. Why does the audio sound scratchy on some songs (on real hardware)?

A. I've spent a lot of time trying to track this down.

   In the perfect world of emulators, chiptune music on the Mockingboard
	sounds great.

   However, on real hardware, it doesn't.  It's almost that some combination
	of writes to the register cause a timer to wait 2^16 cycles before
	updating, leading to glitches in the music.  Possibly it's easier
	to trigger this on the 1MHz Mockingboard than on the 1.77MHz
	Spectrum (or the 2MHz ST) a lot of the music was written on.

   The problem is more noticible on some songs than others.

   Also I think some audio amplifiers have more trouble amplifying the
	square wave signal put out by the AY-3-8910.

Q: Can you fit more than 18 songs on the disk?

A: Yes, it depends on how complex the PT3 files are.
   Also, PT3 files compress nicely and I could fit even more if I LZ4
	compressed them, it's just that would make it harder for other
	people to use the player.

	Yes, I could write code that automatically decode in LZ4 encoded,
	but that gets tricky for various reasons, and you also need
	some RAM to decode the image into.