[LAU] Poll - Was: Hey everyone, a simple question.

Ralf Mardorf ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net
Thu Mar 21 23:43:40 UTC 2013


On Thu, 2013-03-21 at 18:59 -0400, drew Roberts wrote:
> I started in micros on a borrowed TRS-80 Model I.
> 
> http://oldcomputers.net/trs80i.html
> 
> With the cassette drive even. Writing games in basic and saving them
> to tape. 
> Ouch.

No reason for the "Ouch". The Z-80 is a very good processor. I didn't
use it, I was a 65xx coder, but anyway, BASIC isn't worse.

While I programmed most MIDI software in Assembler, I just wrote a MIDI
extension in Assembler for something called speech basic. This MIDI
extension written in Assembler, then were additional BASIC commands,
used to program a MIDI sound sampler in BASIC, without performance
issues and for sure with harder real-time, than usual for PC MIDI.

Perhaps I know somebody who cracked and reassembled Gerhard Lengelings
Supertrack ;), you can't imagine how much you can learn and how good
code can be, to provide something that still can compete with loop
sequencers for PCs, but is running on such simple CPUs.

Modern computers can do things old computers can't do, but the old
computers had some advantages, e.g. no layers to the hardware, so harder
real-time for MIDI.



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