[Coco] DriveWire does MIDI

[William Schaub]

Aaron Wolfe wrote:
> On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 12:07 PM, William Schaub
> <wschaub at steubentech.com> wrote:
>   
>> Aaron Wolfe wrote:
>>     
>>> At the cocofest, Brian Schuhbring showed me his MIDI setup which he
>>> used to play music throughout the event. We talked about using CoCo as
>>> a MIDI player, and of course I wondered if DriveWire could be used.
>>> Turns out it can.  By renaming one of the virtual channels to 'MIDI'
>>> and adding some code to redirect its output to the synthesizer built
>>> into the Java VM, I've got "mfplayer" working pretty well.  I'd expect
>>> that any other program which uses a MIDI device in OS-9 would work as
>>> well.  I also added MIDI file detection to the /N handler, so you can
>>> dump
>>> any standard MIDI file to the /N port and it will play on the PC.
>>>
>>> There is some latency at times.  I have ideas on how to reduce if not
>>> eliminate this.  I'm also going to explore having the server pass the
>>> MIDI events on to an external keyboard or synthesizer the way Brian
>>> does with his setup, which would provide much nicer sounding
>>> instruments.   There are ways to load different sound banks into
>>> Java's internal synth too, that might be interesting.
>>>
>>> Here's a video of DW4/MIDI in action:
>>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2VXN1zIt_g
>>>
>>> So now we have disks, printing, clock, virtual modems, tcp/ip
>>> networking, and MIDI running on the built in bitbanger.
>>>
>>> The CoCo rules :)
>>>
>>> -Aaron
>>>
>>> --
>>> Coco mailing list
>>> Coco at maltedmedia.com
>>> http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
>>>
>>>       
>> That's great I will see about building it from the repository and trying it
>> out.
>>
>>     
>
> The server side code is all in the repo, but to use mfplay you will
> need to have the device for virtual channel #14 renamed to "MIDI".
> Dumping MIDI files to /N will work without this.
>
> I've uploaded a disk with the renamed driver at
> http://sites.google.com/site/drivewire4/beta (called "miditest.dsk")
> This will boot from DW and should be ready for use with any MIDI
> player that uses the /MIDI device.
> and I'll see about getting something into the NitrOS9 CVS so you can
> make your own later today.
>
>
>   
The new server code is all I would likely play with. I don't need the 
feature. dumping the midi file to /N would be more than enough for me. 
but I might play with the midi test disk.