[Coco] DriveWire does MIDI

[Aaron Wolfe]

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