Another IT/hobby-musician type

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Count
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Joined: Tue Mar 21, 2017 1:59 am

Re: Another IT/hobby-musician type

Post by Count »

bluebell wrote:
Count wrote:
bluebell wrote:
I had a Speccy, too, and soldered +32 kB RAM together with a programmable bank switch. I bought a MIDI interface from Jellinghaus (more expensive than the Speccy) and wrote dump programs for Yamaha DX7 and Roland S10 sampler. Archiving the S10 samples on cassette tape was much cheaper than the expensive Quick Disks.

I tried to write a sequencer but I couldn't find out how to get a variable time base / clock. Those were the days ...

Bluebell, ITIL certified (no joke) Linux musician
Sounds some heavy stuff! I was a bit restricted because the Speccy was such an expensive thing for us that peripherals were not really a goer. I was working all hours (as a paperboy!) just so I could go and spend £3:49 on an album on cassette!

I later discovered second hand shops, and picked up a Yamaha MSX computer/MIDI keyboard and had some fun with that, my Speccy and my Yamaha PSS-680 - though I was never able to successfully MIDI the Spectrum up. And the Yamaha and Speccy could never agree on how long 60 seconds was... I am guessing the Yamaha was more accurate?

...you couldn't find a variable time base/clock?
I didn't know anything about writing interrupt routines but don't know if the 50 Hz timer was good enough. Long ago.
Oh I see - you meant you didn't know how to do it, not that it wasn't available! Yeah I started getting a bit under the hood via the Speccy manual as, even though I couldn't get them to MIDI sync, I was still expecting the two machines to at least agree on what 120bmp was - but they were miles apart! I was too young to be able to get right into it - but I was trying to determine which was the more accurate clock - was astounded I was having to do that, I just assumed a silicon chip based system would have a pretty finite clock - after all, TIMING is the essence of a chip!

It's only in the last few years reading more about the Speccy, that I do believe it had a very dodgy clock/timer, amongst other dodgy things! So in retrospect I would expect the dedicated music system inside the Yamaha to have the better system clock, after all it is specifically designed to be talking to other hardware.
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