The French Touch is at it again. Grouik of The French Touch has just contacted me to let me know about the Apple II demo / hacking group’s latest production, Pure Noise, a music disk for the 128K Apple IIe. It requires a Mockingboard sound card and takes full advantage of all 6 channels across its pair of AY-3-8910 sound chips. The disk boots into a colorful graphical player complete with channel and spectrum bars that dance to the stereo playback the included tracks.

I can confirm that the Pure Noise sounds even better on an actual Apple IIe with Mockingboard than in the sample video, below. It’s a most impressive feat for a 1MHz 8-bit computer.

Last year the group wowed retro computing fans with their chiptune music disk, (NOT SO) Cheap Tunes, which I covered back in September. It had been decades since we last saw any program set Sweet Micro System’s Mockingboard to singing, when The French Touch released a disk of Atari ST chiptunes along with a player that played those 3-voice tracks in stereo on the Mockingboard. (The Atari ST, which has mono sound output, features a single 3-voice Yamaha YM2149F, a variant of the AY-3-8910 that was used in many home computers and consoles during the ’80s and ’90s, as well as in the Mockingboard; it has two of them.) Grouik informs me that the tracks included with Pure Noise take full advantage of the Mockingboard hardware, using its 6 audio channels to playback distinct sounds, beyond what was achieved in the earlier music disk.

Over the past few years The French Touch has released a number of Apple II scenedemos, utilities, game patches, and the like. Among the more popular computer systems of the early ’80s, the 8-bit Apple II has probably been the single most neglected in terms of demos coded for it. As someone who is a huge fan of the demoscene, it’s been great finally seeing the 8-bit II really show its stuff in this area. And all of the group’s releases since that first music disk — Plasmagoria, Raster Bars, and Crazy Cycles 2 — have featured excellent audio played through the Mockingboard.

Disk images for all of The French Touch’s releases, along with more information on each, can be found here (English (Google) translation).

Hats off, guys. Please keep the demos coming!