ez001500@astro.Ucdavis.EDU (10/30/90)
Hello all! A musician friend of mine is interested in using his atari
in conjuction with his
various synthesizers via MIDI and he was asking me for help. I (being
utterly ignorant
in such matters) promised I'd post a note to solicit help. He has some
program or another
which allows him to compose & control play and parameters (I forget its
name), which works fine,
but apparently it doesn't allow him to store track (or voice?)
information on disk (he currently
dumps it to a cassette tape -- reading it back is prohibitively slow).
We wish therefore to write our own code to interface with MIDI and his
synths. Has anyone
done this? As near as I can determine, it may be possible to treat the
MIDI as a separate
device, writing a device handler to access it. This is a fine idea,
except I don't know how
to write device handlers (a small technicality... :)). Has anyone done this?
i) someone's software to interface with MIDI that I could look at (and
possibly cannibalize)
ii) a sample device handler for something non-trivial (i.e. not the
null device handler!) that
I could use to model a MIDI handler on
iii) a better way of doing all of this if it exists!
Also, if you're a musician and've used your atari in any major way, drop
me a note -- my friend
(and I) would love to hear from you. He currently uses his atari in
conjunction with this
(for the moment nameless) program, and the results he gets are great!
Thanks for the help! I've always had a fondness for my 8-bit -- it'd be
great to be able to
extend it!
ron braun
e-mail: braun@iris.ucdavis.edu (or ez001500@astro.ucdavis.edu)