KVR Audio

AusDisciple · Post by **AusDisciple** » Tue Jul 29, 2014 4:24 pm

kbaccki wrote:
AusDisciple wrote:Here's a pic of the Dick Smith System 80 (Z80 CPU)...
Seriously? There was a thing called a "Dick Smith System 80"? I guess that eventually went the way of the Joe Blow 9000...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Smith_(entrepreneur)

Numanoid · Post by **Numanoid** » Tue Jul 29, 2014 5:54 pm

kbaccki wrote:Seriously? There was a thing called a "Dick Smith System 80"? I guess that eventually went the way of the Joe Blow 9000...

Well you got Dave Smith Instruments, so why not Dick Smith System

petervh · Post by **petervh** » Tue Jul 29, 2014 6:06 pm

more threads like this, please!

zendorf · Post by **zendorf** » Wed Jul 30, 2014 12:01 am

Numanoid wrote:
kbaccki wrote:Seriously? There was a thing called a "Dick Smith System 80"? I guess that eventually went the way of the Joe Blow 9000...
Well you got Dave Smith Instruments, so why not Dick Smith System

As someone who has grown up in Australia, I always found it disturbing when early advertising blurbs would refer to him as the "electronic Dick"

Btw, the Coco was also my first computer and introduced me to some of the good things in life such as coding and games. Ah, the good old days when you had to type the source code of a game in from a magazine to get a new game to play....the kids don't know how easy they have it now

AusDisciple · Post by **AusDisciple** » Wed Jul 30, 2014 12:47 am

zendorf wrote:......Btw, the Coco was also my first computer and introduced me to some of the good things in life such as coding and games. Ah, the good old days when you had to type the source code of a game in from a magazine to get a new game to play....the kids don't know how easy they have it now

I still have some issues of Hot CoCo magazine floating around here.

Frantz · Post by **Frantz** » Wed Jul 30, 2014 12:51 am

I always wondered who bought those Tandy Color Computers (apparently called CoCos). It turns out Australians were keeping Radio Shack in business. I never meet anyone in New York who owned a CoCo. We were into our Commodores, Ataris, and Apples.

AusDisciple · Post by **AusDisciple** » Wed Jul 30, 2014 12:55 am

Frantz wrote:I always wondered who bought those Tandy Color Computers (apparently called CoCos). It turns out Australians were keeping Radio Shack in business. I never meet anyone in New York who owned a CoCo. We were into our Commodores, Ataris, and Apples.

Commodore 64 vs TRS-80 was a big thing here in the 80s. It was the Apple vs Microsoft of the time. Interestingly, the TRS-80 Extended Colour BASIC was actually a Microsoft OS.

Frantz · Post by **Frantz** » Wed Jul 30, 2014 1:13 am

AusDisciple wrote: Commodore 64 vs TRS-80 was a big thing here in the 80s. It was the Apple vs Microsoft of the time. Interestingly, the TRS-80 Extended Colour BASIC was actually a Microsoft OS.

In my world, it was Commodore 64 vs Atari 800 and they were pretty equally matched. Commodore Basic was also licensed from Microsoft. Bill Gates had his hands in every pie.

kbaccki · Post by **kbaccki** » Wed Jul 30, 2014 3:45 am

zendorf wrote:Ah, the good old days when you had to type the source code of a game in from a magazine to get a new game to play....

And by "source code" I assume you mean machine code in hex format. Each line with a checksum. Including hundreds of lines of hex for the sprite data. Oh, I was giddy with anticipation, late into the eve, to see what joyous delight would bring each nibble and byte typed so lovingly and carefully...

zendorf · Post by **zendorf** » Wed Jul 30, 2014 8:50 am

Hehe, yeah most of it was BASIC language but I do remember typing in some Assembly language games...what joy! Anyway it was good practice as I taught myself the basics of Assembly before I turned 12. Funnily enough I might have trouble getting my head around it now, being spoiled by all the easy new fangled languages such as Python and Lua

kbaccki · Post by **kbaccki** » Wed Jul 30, 2014 11:30 am

Long live the 6502/6510. Man, you know you have a nice little design when a 10, 11, 12 year old says "hey, this is pretty cool!".

I was partial to COMPUTE! Gazette, which had a lot of hex listings… like this:

Now, should that excite a 11 year old? Is there a hidden image of a nekid woman in there that my 40 year old eyes just can't see anymore? Or am I just weird? I'm thinking I'm just weird.

I was in heaven when I got my hands on my first mnemonic assembler… though there was something kinda fun about hand assembling/disassembling the hex to assembly and vice versa on a piece of graph paper… what a freakin' dork I am!

Numanoid · Post by **Numanoid** » Wed Jul 30, 2014 2:18 pm

Frantz wrote:We were into our Commodores

I had my Commodore sixtyfour

A bad decision on my part was not buying an Amiga in the early 90's. I realize now I would have had a lot more flexibility using tracker software, compared to using a 4 track recorder as I did back then.

xoxos · Post by **xoxos** » Wed Jul 30, 2014 7:55 pm

coco.. think the "synthesizer" cartridge uses about the same language. iirc the pitch of higher notes was compromised by the sample rate

iirc my card could do one? voice in each channel for 2 voice poly.

i had a tape of several rhythmic/atonal pieces i'd recorded.. played very fast as backing for other material sounds good.

Integratron · Post by **Integratron** » Wed Jul 30, 2014 10:44 pm

Frantz · Post by **Frantz** » Thu Jul 31, 2014 2:57 am

Numanoid wrote: I had my Commodore sixtyfour

A bad decision on my part was not buying an Amiga in the early 90's. I realize now I would have had a lot more flexibility using tracker software, compared to using a 4 track recorder as I did back then.

I jumped on all the Commodores the moment they came out: Vic 20, C=64, and Amiga. I got an Amiga in 1985 and within a few years got Music-X which was my first taste of electronic music making. Music-X was an effective "gateway drug" leading to permanent electronic music making addiction for me. It was ahead of its time. It had a piano roll and you could edit notes with a mouse. Light years ahead of Orchestra-80.

The limitation of the Amiga's internal sound engine was that it could only play four 8 bit samples simultaneously. Since drums typically have two sounds playing simultaneously (kick + hats), there was only room for two other parts before you ran out of sounds. You could get a MIDI interface for the Amiga but I never did. By the early 90s, I moved onto a PC with Cubase.

TRS-80 ORCH80 Free