[Coco] DriveWire does MIDI

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 12:07 PM, William Schaub
<wschaub at steubentech.com> wrote:
> Aaron Wolfe wrote:
>>
>> 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
>>
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>>
>
> That's great I will see about building it from the repository and trying it
> out.
>

The server side code is all in the repo, but to use mfplay you will
need to have the device for virtual channel #14 renamed to "MIDI".
Dumping MIDI files to /N will work without this.

I've uploaded a disk with the renamed driver at
http://sites.google.com/site/drivewire4/beta (called "miditest.dsk")
This will boot from DW and should be ready for use with any MIDI
player that uses the /MIDI device.
and I'll see about getting something into the NitrOS9 CVS so you can
make your own later today.


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