[Coco] How did Musica ][ work? (half-text, half-PMODE4)?

[Bill Pierce]

I have the sources of Lester Hand's last version of Musica ][ (1.8). I was in contact with him for about a year. In fact, I had him "almost" back into the Coco Community three years ago, as he even bought a new Coco 3 from Cloud 9 and was writing a new MIDI program, but he seemed to lose interest. He sent me several of his sources (Lyra, Musica, CocoMIDI Pro, etc) before he decided he didn't have the time to do Coco programming and run his practice as well (M.D.).

Lester uses several tricks in Musica ][. Along with the split screen, he uses the area under the disk rom for data storage (switching roms in/out as needed), and also has embedded BASIC code (disk access stuff) that is moved into the BASIC area on startup.

He never did write a Coco 3 version, though his last version would run on a Coco 3, but didn't use any of it's features.
Musica ][ will not run on Vcc due to Vcc's lack of support for the video mode used (hopefully to be corrected), but will run on Mess.

 He also had "Jukebox" programs for both Lyra and Musica for playing continuous music (no graphics).
In the Coco 2 days, Lester had the market on Coco music programs with Lyra, Musica, CocoMIDI 2, 3, & Pro. Then along came the Coco 3, OS9 L2, and Mike Knudsen's "Ultimuse3" which blew Lyra out the water with Umuse's 7 staves, 16 parts VS Lyra's 2 staves, 8 parts. Lester tried to move Lyra to Os9, but never quite grasped the OS9 programming so he then moved to MSDOS/Windows, but never got far with that. He saw a much larger MIDI market there with Cakewalk and Cubase just getting started, so he gave it up. He should have stayed with the Coco... we needed the support about then...

 


Bill Pierce
"Charlie stole the handle, and the train it won't stop going, no way to slow down!" - Ian Anderson - Jethro Tull

 

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-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Devries <devries.bob at gmail.com>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Tue, May 3, 2016 5:08 pm
Subject: Re: [Coco] How did Musica ][ work? (half-text, half-PMODE4)?

On 2016-05-04 5:55 AM, Arthur Flexser wrote:> I'm guessing it used the vertical and horizontal interrupts to switch> graphics modes on each screen frame when the scanning reached a certain> line.>> Art>Yes, and this caused some problems on the PAL coco. I spent some time disassembling the programme, to find where the switch happened, and "ädjust" the line count for PAL.Regards, Bob DevriesDalby, QLD, Australia-- Coco mailing listCoco at maltedmedia.comhttps://pairlist5.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/coco