[Coco] More coco music on the web

[Torsten Dittel]

Bill Pierce via Coco <coco at ...> writes:

> While doing some Coco related searching, I found some Coco related music
on a site.
> The music is by Walter Myers. He states he used a Coco 3, Yamaha TX91Z,
and OS9 running a "Lyra to Midi"
> program... (never seen this one.. anyone?)
> This is some pretty good stuff 

Interesting find. I remember the Yamaha TX81Z very well, that was the time
when the DX7-like "digital" FM sound kind of defined electronic and popular
music of the 80s (until the "analog" sound was re-discovered - however, the
Korg Poly800EX was a great companion in the 80s in our MIDI rack...). Since
it had some other-than-sine waveforms in his ROM as well, it had some
impressive pre-programmed bass sounds if I remeber that well (gosh, that's
some 25 to 30 years ago...). It was kind of impossible to program that one
thanks to it's limited UI.

I remember I tried to manage and back-up sound banks with a MIDI Dump SW I
wrote for the CoCo2 using the bitbanger port (I hope I will ever find that
peace of ML source again - it had a nice PMODE 4 GUI incuding mouse pointer
and a piano keyboard at the bottom of the screen which was highlighting the
MIDI notes (poly-phone!) in real time - that was fun to watch while playing
on the MIDI keyboard. I wanted to make that piece of SW a sequencer (with
rec/play) as well, but I never terminated that work when I got my first
ATARI 1040STFM with C-LAB Notator SL in 1989). However, the TX81Z had some
nasty issues with the SYSEX dump handshake (I think the 6303-type µC was too
slow for all the tasks it had - they should have used a 6309 ;-)).

Thanks for bringing some memories back. I need to get all this stuff out of
the boxes despite I doubt my MEGA ST4 and the MegaFile20 (20MB HD, LOL!)
will power up after all the time...

Regards,
Torsten

PS: I just googled that one:
https://soundcloud.com/chaconne/tx81z-bass-sounds