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

drew Roberts zotz at 100jamz.com
Fri Mar 22 01:46:14 UTC 2013


On Thursday 21 March 2013 19:43:40 Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> 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.

The ouch was for the saving and loading programs to a standard cassette player 
and tape. I enjoyed the computer very much. Even more so when we got an 
expansion interface and a daisy chain of floppy drives.
>
> 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.

all the best,

drew


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