Floppy Disk Orchestra Plays The Star Wars Theme

 

Just when we thought floppy disks were becoming a thing of the technological past, this genius of a man decided to build an old- school electronic orchestra which could play classic tunes such as “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, “Hawaii 5-0 Theme”, and my personal favorites, “Star Wars Theme”, and “Imperial Death March”.

The Floppotron, created by Pawel Zadrożniak, is a serious work of art. He explains a bit in his blog how he came to coding this throwback masterpiece:

“Host application was written in Python 2.7. I wrote it mostly on some boring lectures when I was still studying at the university, so it’s a one big mess, but… at least it does the job. It parses the simple language used for writing note sequences arranged in tracks tied to a specific controller / channel and merges those parallel tracks into one command list which is transferred over COM port. It can also partially generate „song script” from MIDI file which speeds up the „song porting” process. “

Inspiration can come at the most unexpected of times I guess.

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The Floppotron was no easy feat to create and consists of many components-

64 floppy drives

8 eight-channel controllers – which are able to emulate ADSR envelopes for the floppy drives

8 hard disc drives

2 four-channel controllers- which emulate envelopes for the HDDs

2 Optical Scanners

2 Single channel Arduino controllers for the scanners

 

Check the vids to see (and hear) the old school system brought to life!

 

Surfs up with Hawaii 5-0 !

 

[su_youtube_advanced url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32kWuKysE6A” showinfo=”no” rel=”no” modestbranding=”yes” https=”yes”]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji8CIi93Mhk[/su_youtube_advanced]

 

Bringing the Smell of Teen Spirit Back !

 

[su_youtube_advanced url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwuCQ3u2N_A” showinfo=”no” rel=”no” modestbranding=”yes” https=”yes”]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji8CIi93Mhk[/su_youtube_advanced]

 

and my favorite Star Wars !

 

[su_youtube_advanced url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oym7B7YidKs” showinfo=”no” rel=”no” modestbranding=”yes” https=”yes”]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji8CIi93Mhk[/su_youtube_advanced]

 

This has got to be the best thing I’ve seen since playing Oregon Trail on an MS-DOS system.. Care to know more about the Floppotron and Pawel Zadrożniak’s work? You can check out his personal blog here:

http://silent.org.pl/home/2016/07/06/return-of-the-floppies/