[net.micro] music application for the c64

prindle@NADC.ARPA (08/17/84)

Apparently, much of the traffic on net.micro.cbm never makes it to the ARPANET,
because I never saw the original article.  But anyway, the C64 joystick trigger
button doesn't interrupt the cpu (it does toggle a line on the VIC chip which
causes the VIC chip to save the light pen raster coordinates).  Furthermore,
the joystick ports are only 5 bits each and are shared with the keyboard
scan ports (contol port 1 is 5 rows of keyboard in, control port 2 is 5 columns
of keyboard out scan), so the keyboard scan would have to be disabled in the
kernel before you could assume complete control over these ports.  I don't
know what kind of D to A conversion was required, but 5 bits only gives 32
possible analog levels.

Does anyone know why ARPANET coverage of net.micro.cbm seems so sporadic?

Frank Prindle
Prindle@NADC.ARPA