Mockingboard

The Mockingboard is a sound card for the Apple II family of microcomputers built by Sweet Micro Systems. The standard Apple II machines never had particularly good sound, especially when compared to competitors like the SID chip-featuring Commodore 64. With the notable exception of the Apple II, all an Apple II programmer could do was to form sounds out of single clicks sent to the speaker at specific moments, which made the creation of complex sounds extremely difficult to program and made it mostly impossible to do any other processing during the creation of sounds. The Mockingboard allowed programmers to send complex, high-quality sound via its specialized hardware, without need for constant CPU attention. The Mockingboard could be connected to the Apple's built-in speaker or to external speakers. However, as the quality of the built-in speaker was not high, the instruction manual recommended obtaining external speakers.