[Coco] Orchestra 90CC

[Willard Goosey]

On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 06:57:05AM -0400, Rogelio Perea wrote:
> Did some research to jolt dormant neurons... the Software Affair music
> file encoding took a text file (with all the commands for the music
> notation) using a *partial compression* of the last characters at the
> end of each line by setting its high “bit” to one,  two bytes were
> saved that otherwise would have been used for CR/LF control character
> terminators. 

Bleah!  So extract probably works correctly then.  OK, I'll take
another stab at this.

Oh man...I've got  a couple megs of zip'd orc files, and they're
probably all compressed like this... :-(

>These *compressed* text files usually show up in music
> libraries with the ORC extension; music libraries with raw text files
> (suitable for printing and straight through e-tranfer) usually have
> the ASC extension - these need to be converted before the compiler in
> Orchestra can score them properly.

Hey, you the man!  Thanks for digging all this up!  I'd never heard of
any of this before.
> 
> There was a RSDOS utility program available to do this - it may have
> been written by Rick Adams IIRC. Tried finding it in RTSI to no avail,
> and what's left of the Compuserve archives only has the Basic09
> version of it:

Humm, doesn't seem to be in the old Princeton archive, either. 

The silly thing is he's still got to boot into rsdos (orc-dos?) to
actually play the sound files. ;-)

> That calls the use of the RSDOS OS9<->RSDOS transfer utility.

Lets see... trsdos->linux->msdos->os9->rsdos.  Gee, can I route this
through my Amiga or something, also? :-)
> 
> Back to the TRSDOS Orchestra files: Even if they already are stored in
> compressed mode, moving them to the CoCo requires the file to end up
> without an extension on the RSDOS disk, Orchestra CC doesn't like it -

Yep.  I remembered that part.

Thanks again!
Willard
-- 
Willard Goosey  goosey at sdc.org
Socorro, New Mexico, USA
I search my heart and find Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.
  -- R.E. Howard