Tweety is a System 7 extension for the Mac. Once loaded, it will randomly play sounds in the background while you use your computer. The standard sounds it comes with are soothing (IMHO :-) bird sounds, though you can change the sounds to be anything you desire. See below for customization instructions.
How To Install
Place the Tweety file in your extensions folder in the system folder of the boot drive, and restart your machine. If succefully loaded, you will see the icon come up on the bottom of the screen. If the icon shows up with a red X across it, then Tweety was not loaded either because of an error, or because the user cancelled loading.
To cancel loading of the Tweety extension, hold down the option key just before it loads. Once loaded, the only way to stop the sound is to restart your machine.
Changing Sounds
You can use a resource editor such as ResEdit to change or add new sounds to this extension. Make sure there is at least one sound in the Tweety extension, otherwise it will not load. You can have any number of sounds, and Tweety will load them all and pick one at random each time it plays. If you add sounds, YOU MUST MAKE SURE THE SYSTEM HEAP AND LOCKED BITS ARE SET FOR EACH SOUND! Otherwise they will not load properly and subsequently not work.
Keep in mind the sounds are loaded at boot time into the system heap. This means if you have 1MB of sounds in the tweety file, it will take up 1MB of your RAM all the time. This is not a problem with your machine functioning, so long as you have enough memory.
You can also change the rate at which Tweety plays sounds. The 'Rate' resource contains two values. The first is the minumum number of seconds to wait before playing a sounds, and the second is the maximum. Again this resource must be marked SYSTEM HEAP AND LOCKED.
Things to be done
If you like this program, please send me a post card. If I get enough response, I will write a second version that will include the following features (as well as others):
- Control panel interface to turn on and off
- Ability to change sounds on the fly, without rebooting
- Dynamic loading of sounds from the disk, so you do not have to keep all the
sounds loaded into memory all the time.
Known Bugs/Anomolies
If used with PixelFlipper, PixelFlipper must load BEFORE Tweety.
This software has been tested on Mac II class machines, Quadras, and powerbooks, and seems to run fine under system 7.0 and 7.01. It could have problems with other system extensions as well. If you are having a problem running Tweety, try turning off your other system extensions one at a time until it works. When you isolate the conflicting extension, reverse the order in which it loads with Tweety. Chances are it will work then.
Please report any other bugs or comments to me at one of the above addresses.
