simonowen
enhancement: emulate disk noise
Just ran into jsbeeb via this thread on spectrumcomputing.co.uk, the disk loading noises are wonderful! Can we have them on SimCoupe too please. :-)
I've also wanted disk loading noises for a while, and even tried to record my own samples. It turned out to be harder than expected to get clean recordings so I gave up! If I get the general mechanism working we can worry about finding suitable samples under a permissive licence.
I'll need to make some improvements to the floppy drive emulation and sound mixing to prepare the way. The drive emulation will need to respect the original 300rpm rotation and FDC step rate, so the sample playback matches what the drive is doing. That will probably slow down the loading process but give a more authentic user experience. The sounds can always be disabled when Fast Disk Access is enabled, to restore the current behaviour.
It might not be added very soon as I'm in the middle of other things, but this issue can be a reminder.
The arculator source on GitHub is GPLv2 so we should be able to use its samples. It seems to use an approximation of behaviour rather than trying to exactly match head behaviour, which may be good enough for us too.