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