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. _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
