[Coco] NitrOS9/BASIC09 equivalent SOUND and PLAY Commands

[James Jones]

Microsoft for a while was in the business of grinding out BASIC
interpreters for various brands and models of personal computers. (If you
remember Russ "Russy-poo" Walter's *Secret Guide to Computers--*he's still
around, BTW!--one edition of the secret guide had what I suspect was a
semi-serious section claiming that personal computers tended to succeed if
their makers would "pay [the] Bill", i.e. get Microsoft to do BASIC for
them.)

There was a core language and an interpreter which had to be rewritten for
a particular target processor, and they'd add custom commands for specific
features of a particular computer--typically graphics and sound.

OTOH, Microware was in the business of supporting a wide variety of
computers, many of them embedded systems. Before I went to work at
Microware, I worked for a fellow who had a Smoke Signal Broadcasting
Chieftain with multiple Wyse terminals where we generated reports and form
letters and the like. No games, no need to play game theme songs, so there
wasn't anything to customize it for--and why bother, when you can RUN
procedures written in whatever language as long as it honors what we'd now
call the BASIC09 ABI?

On Sun, Mar 1, 2020 at 8:27 PM <pfitchjr at bellsouth.net> wrote:

> I was never much for creating music back in the day on my Coco 1 (never
> had a 2).  When OS9 Lvl 2 came out, I got a Coco 3 and never looked back.
> But, at the time, I really didn't notice that Basic09 seemed to be missing
> SOUND and PLAY commands.  As the CoCo 3 HAS the hardware, I'm a bit
> surprised that equivalent commands and/or add-ons were never produced.  Or,
> if they have been, I never caught wind of them.
>
> So do they exist?  I'm looking to use them with Basic09, not shell
> scripts. And a full featured music package isn't really what I need for my
> project.
>
>
> --
> Coco mailing list
> Coco at maltedmedia.com
> https://pairlist5.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
>