Byte jams are a fun demoscene event where there's usually music from a DJ and several participants who use the TIC-80 fantasy console to code up a graphics effect from scratch within an hour. I usually watch the Field-FX stream on Monday evenings, and occasionally take part; there's an archive of the graphical effects people have made in these sessions, here.

A rather neat part of this is that TIC-80 has been modified to allow its programs to access the FFT of a sound stream, so that you can make your programs respond to the music in real-time. However, this can require a bit of setup on a mac.

In this document I will describe how to set up the audio software, plus byte jam client and TIC-80 itself, to allow participation in a byte jam.

Apple have long stopped supporting the mid-2011 mac mini I had sitting in the living room, so rather than contribute to the e-waste problem I decided to stick linux on it. The general consensus seems to be that you should keep macOS bootable to make it easier to deal with any firmware issues down the line, so I wanted to set it up to dual boot. The documentation I was able to find on how to do this seemed scattered or out of date.

There are a number of little wrinkles to this process:

• macOS quite reasonably assumes it'll be the only thing running on the machine; you need to install a boot manager to let you choose between macOS, linux, or whatever else. I went with rEFInd.
• Something seems a bit off with the default video setup, such that when I first booted into Debian the screen went blank immediately after enabling kernel modesetting.
• The mac mini wifi uses a Broadcom chipset with non-free drivers which you have to download separately. I s