[Coco] Was unix, now SSC Tracker (MiniHog)

[KnudsenMJ at aol.com]

In a message dated 2/1/05 2:01:45 AM Eastern Standard Time,  jhoger at pobox.com 
writes:

>  I am writing this program to create music easily with the  SSC 
> AND to write the music for MiniHog as well.  It's about time  somebody 
wrote 
> a program for the SSC to make music easily with  it.  Unless there is 
> something else out there for it that I  don't know about in some Rainbow 
> magazine, I wonder why it hadn't  been done before.

I remember I bought an SSC from Radio Shack because I  wanted in on the
whole Speech Synthesis hype (who didn't)... plugged it in,  fed a few
sentences to it through BASIC, and it worked. And now  what?

Back in the box it went.

I didn't even realize it had any  other purpose beyond music.

I know Radio Shack sold something called  Pan that allowed you to play
music through the SSC, but I'd already taken  my cart back so I never got
to try it.



That cart (I had one too, and probably sold it a couple years ago) has a  
single stock AY-13xx music chip.  It can play three musical notes at once  
(square waves, with some attack-decay), plus some percussion effects made with  
filtered white noise.
 
If you accept the three-voice limitation, then you can have some fun with  it.
But I never considered it worth supporting from UltiMusE.  Now that  Boisy 
and others have the UME sources, gang up on them if you want it :-)   Somewhere 
I have the docs for that chip, but it was thoroughly discussed at some  length 
right here a couple years ago (Torsten in Germany was heavily into  it).
 
I sold someone recently (again, from this List) my Symphony-12 Pak that had  
FOUR of those chips, for 12 voices.  Now that was a real instrument.
 
"Pan" was a simple little program, actually the first OS-9 music composer's  
program to support real musical notation.  Just barely.  --Mike  K.