Can I make my Mac play "Chariots of Fire"?

[sega dude]

Can I make my Macintosh Plus play "Chariots of Fire" like the original Macintosh did in the 1984 Macintosh Introduction? Was it really the Macintosh itself that played the song?

 

[MinerAl]

It was a CD.  Check out http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Intro_Demo.txt for the full story!

 

[CC_333]

No, the Macintosh never actually played it. As far as I know, they actually tried to get it to play, but the hardware was too primitive, so they cheated and used a CD player instead.

EDIT: What MinerAl said!

c

 

[commodorejohn]

It probably wasn't the hardware so much as the lack of time. The Mac boot-beep already does a hacky approximation of lowpass filtering, and I can think of a couple other quick-and-dirty ways to mimic analog-style subtractive synthesis that would be passably performant on an 8MHz 68000, but according to Hertzfeld he only had about two days to do the entire thing, so I imagine at that point they just had to make the call not to pursue it further.

 

[unity]

Not sure if I would really call it cheating. If they said the Mac was going to play the music, or even implied to the audience, then used a CD. Sure. But at the time no digital computer I know of could play CD quality music. So I dont think the audience was fooled.

 

[TheWhiteFalcon]

The IIgs would probably be the first Apple computer that could do a decent approximation, wouldn't it?

 

[uniserver]

yes, you could down mix the mp3 to mono 22khz AIFF.

then use SFPLAY to play it...  

the only deal is your mac has to have a Apple Sound Chip.

So Any Mac Portable or PowerBook will work.

So The Mac II and so on will work

So the LC and later will work.

The SE/30 and the Classic II will work.

For machines like the  128k / 512k / PLUS / 8mhz SE / Classic I

you are stuck with 4 channel midi at the best, and i'm, sure there is a ( close enough ) .midi file out there somewhere that \

probably even sounds ok.... 4 channels was still pretty snazzy even for the 128k of the day.

I'm sure amiga guys though have a good laugh... but its ok.

 

[uniserver]

https://plus.google.com/photos/yourphotos?pid=5947846788051504178&oid=100890837144428718359

should work it's a mac portable playing an AIFF music file.

 

[aplmak]

I have a question... Does a demo disk exist that show's the same intro that Steve showed?? An actual boot disk that has the scrolling "MACINTOSH" and the demo of the screen shots.. Along with the text and the speaking text??? Just curious....

 

[uniserver]

as far as i know that does not exist,  there was a member overseas that made one that mostly emulates it, and its close but no cigar.

 

[unity]

I heard someone does have a copy, but they are not willing to share or demonstrate. Sharing (as in copying) I understand to an extent, rare software is like rare machines. But not wishing to demonstrate, not so much. But for now this is just lore to me that I read on here.

 

[sega dude]

uniserver, where can I get the one that mostly emulates the 1984 Intro?