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Re: [microsound] amstrad



bill thompson wrote:

hi kas,

i have just found the same computer (the 12 battery
beast)...have you found a use for it? i'm dying to do
something with it but haven't really come up with
anything yet. if you get any cool ideas, let me
know...i'd love to show up at a gig and pop open this
one amongst a bunch of macs and toshiba laptops :)

b.




Yeah, that's exactly how I feel.

I do have a sequencer that's supposed to run on dos 3.3 (sequencer plus, the one that Sisters of Mercy use/used) but that's over one floppy in size so....

The best I think that could be done is coding something up that sends data to the paralel or printer ports, then hacking some device into the space for the second drive that would generate sound based on that data. Perhaps a CEM chip or two...

The problem is basically that hardly anything can be found that will run in 512K of ram on a 8086 CPU, I found a copy of tetris in pure ASM that will run but the slow lcd gives up long before I do so that's not much fun.

There's a speaker in there so that one could be modified to output to a jack, cerquit bending style. Now that I think of it; the second hand store around the corner has a rather depressing section on "computer sience" that may have a book on -say- Pascal that could perhaps include commands on adressing the internal speaker. This would open the way to a simplistic sequencer that might give the Micromusic crowd a run for it's money.

I did look for old MIDI interfaces but the ones I saw tended to require unreasonable stuff like windows 3.11

From time to time I do some looking, basically just like you I'd just realy love to do a set or two carying in that thing, practicing my straight face in front of the mirror before hand but it'd take so much time and effort that after a while I always decide I'd be better off spending my time on more practical stuff....


Kas.

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