22 Mar
2013
22 Mar
'13
2:46 a.m.
On Thursday 21 March 2013 19:43:40 Ralf Mardorf wrote:
On Thu, 2013-03-21 at 18:59 -0400, drew Roberts
wrote:
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.
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.
all the best,
drew