[Coco] DW4 and external midi devices

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 11:35 PM, Allen Huffman <alsplace at pobox.com> wrote:
> On May 21, 2010, at 10:10 PM, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
>
>> I added some midi commands to the 'dw' interface which let you view
>
> Very nice.
>
> I remember fondly my old CoCo MIDI days (my first commercial CoCo program was a MIDI Librarian sold by Rutherford Research).
>
> When you use mfplay, what format file is that thing playing? You say you can dump a file to the device, which implies just sending over a standard midi file format and having the PC do all the processing (not really the CoCo), but the player should be parsing the file and sending out MIDI ON and MIDI OFF note commands and such, so the CoCo would really be doing the playing.
>
> Are both cases true?
>

Yes..  mfplay is doing all the work when it plays.. it is timing the
events and sending individual note on/note off midi messages.  All the
DriveWire server is doing is passing the byte stream to a synthesizer,
whether the internal Java synth or an external midi device.  This is
the "true" way to do things, with the CoCo running the show.  mfplay
uses a format that is not regular midi (.mid type) files.  I honestly
don't know exactly what the difference is, at the fest Brian told me
its a form of midi thats been compressed or stripped down somehow.
There don't seem to be any program change events, aftertouch, or much
of anything besides note on/note off but I haven't taken a close look.
 There seems to be a tool for converting files into the "cfm" format
mfplay uses, but I haven't had a chance to play with that yet.

Anybody know if there is an archive of cfm files somewhere?  I have
only four songs which I found in on RTSI along with the player.  I'd
also like to try out any other CoCo midi players and see how they
work, any suggestions?

The other mechanism for playing MIDI I showed in the first video
(dumping a file to the /N device) is just sending the data to the
server and putting the sequencing and other work on the server side.
this is "cheating" :)

-Aaron


> And does anyone remember the guy from 10-15 years ago that was the huge MIDI guy who made one of the only full MIDI player programs we had on OS-9? I can't remember his name.
>
>                -- A
>
> --
> Coco mailing list
> Coco at maltedmedia.com
> http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
>