[Coco] DriveWire does MIDI

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 12:46 PM, Brian Blake <random.rodder at gmail.com> wrote:
> Aaron,
>
> I just ordered the HDB-DOS DW pak from Boisy. Should I have better luck with
> DW4 with this than I did the floppy image we tried to use? Or is there a
> special ROM for DW4?
>

There is no special ROM for DW4, it is designed to work with the
DriveWire 3 ROM.  In fact, for a long time we didn't want to call it
DriveWire at all, since it sort of goes in a new direction and doesn't
add much on the "drive" side of things.  In the end, we couldn't
come up with a better name, so it sort of became DriveWire 4 by
default.  We worried that it would be assumed there is a DW4 ROM
to go along with the server version 4, so I try to reiterate often
that this is not the case.  DW3 ROM is the most current DW ROM and
DW4 is designed to work with it.

I'm sorry but I don't remember the exact issue we had before, I've
worked with a lot of people who had a lot of issues (joking :).  Boisy
found and corrected an issue not too long ago that may have resolved
the problem we had before, I know it affected certain situations where
you want to boot from a non DW device and then use the DW modules in
OS-9.

We need to get a better mechanism in place for building disks for DW.
Right now we support booting from ROM in the default images on
nitros9.org, but getting the DW drivers onto a disk that boots from
anything else is sort of a chore.  I'd like to at least generate
images for booting from standard FD.  Yet another project :)

-Aaron


>
> Thanks,
>
> Brian
>
> On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 12:07 PM, William Schaub <wschaub at steubentech.com>wrote:
>
>> Aaron Wolfe wrote:
>>
>>> At the cocofest, Brian Schuhbring showed me his MIDI setup which he
>>> used to play music throughout the event. We talked about using CoCo as
>>> a MIDI player, and of course I wondered if DriveWire could be used.
>>> Turns out it can.  By renaming one of the virtual channels to 'MIDI'
>>> and adding some code to redirect its output to the synthesizer built
>>> into the Java VM, I've got "mfplayer" working pretty well.  I'd expect
>>> that any other program which uses a MIDI device in OS-9 would work as
>>> well.  I also added MIDI file detection to the /N handler, so you can
>>> dump
>>> any standard MIDI file to the /N port and it will play on the PC.
>>>
>>> There is some latency at times.  I have ideas on how to reduce if not
>>> eliminate this.  I'm also going to explore having the server pass the
>>> MIDI events on to an external keyboard or synthesizer the way Brian
>>> does with his setup, which would provide much nicer sounding
>>> instruments.   There are ways to load different sound banks into
>>> Java's internal synth too, that might be interesting.
>>>
>>> Here's a video of DW4/MIDI in action:
>>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2VXN1zIt_g
>>>
>>> So now we have disks, printing, clock, virtual modems, tcp/ip
>>> networking, and MIDI running on the built in bitbanger.
>>>
>>> The CoCo rules :)
>>>
>>> -Aaron
>>>
>>> --
>>> Coco mailing list
>>> Coco at maltedmedia.com
>>> http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
>>>
>>>
>> That's great I will see about building it from the repository and trying it
>> out.
>>
>>
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