TMBG posted this 5-frame pixel art animation to their twitter, and
I decided to see if I could make it play on the Apple II.
Sadly it didn't map well to the rectangular pixels of regular lo-res
graphics. It fits nicely on an Apple IIe using 80x48 "double lo-res" mode.
Then of course it was sort of boring without music, so I wasted some time
converting an Amiga mod I found from 1991 of Ana Ng (by FiletO'Fish and
CompuWiz apparently) to pt3 AY-3-8910 format. It turned out sort of OK,
but as you can tell I'm not really a proper musician.
Video
Capture from the AppleWin emulator. Haven't had time to run on real
hardware. On real hardware the music will probably sound a bit worse,
but I am using an "improved" version of my pt3 player which might help
a bit.
System Requirements
Apple IIe. You need 64k and a Mockingboard if.
Will maybe also work on IIc/IIgs (though only tested
in various emulators)
A. Probably not. While in the old days I had surprisingly good luck
on twitter getting things noticed by related famous people,
I've never had TMBG respond to anything I post.
Q. Why did you pick "Ana Ng" for the song?
A. I was throwing this together quick so I was looking for Amiga MOD files
as they are relatively easy to convert to PT3. I actually
had both "She's an Angel" and "Birdhouse in Your Soul"
MODs floating around from the 1990s that I had downloaded at some
point, but modern module players like xmp or milkytracker play them
wrong, the notes are off. I then found "Ana Ng" on the module
archive and while of similar vintage it seemed to play better.
Development Notes
V1.0 notes -- 16 December 2025
Made this quickly in a few hours. Modified my current hi-res animation
code (as see in star lady) to instead work
on double-lores. That ended up being easier than I thought. That
might come in useful later. Converting the music took longer, but going
from a .MOD is much faster than going from a .MIDI or sheet music.
