[Coco] WANTED: MUSICTRS80 Code and Data

[Arthur Flexser]

I thought you might possibly be mistaken about that article being the first
4-voice sound for the CoCo, since I remembered that when I bought my CoCo,
there was an issue of Color Computer News in the box that had such an
example.  But I looked at issues in the Color Computer Archive, and it was
in the July, 1982 one (I remembered the yellow cover), a few months later
than the one you mention.

https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Magazines/Color%20Computer%20News/Color%20Computer%20News%20%2310%20-%20July%201982.pdf

It is the article entitled "William Tell", by Garry Howard,  on p16, which
has the source for playing the William Tell Overture in 4 voices.  It may
not have been the first, but the source is quite legible, though you'd have
to be a masochist to type in all the music data by hand.  Might be
scannable, though.  There is no text accompanying the source listing (other
than the comments within it).  This makes me think that the author may have
been using some earlier source code and just contributed his WIlliam Tell
rendering to CCN.  So, perhaps the source is the same as the one you have
the semi-legible copy of?

Art

On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 10:06 AM Robert "Exile In Paradise" Murphey <
exile at weylan-yutani.com> wrote:

> Dear fellow CoConauts,
> I hope someone here can help chase down an article/code.
>
> 68 Micro Journal published a letter from Clell Dildy in the March 1982
> issue (volume 4, number 3 pp. 35-37) with 6809 assembly source code for
> MUSICTRS80, a 4-voice DAC sound player, along with music data for John
> Denver's "Take Me Home Country Roads".
> The Internet Archive and SWTPC archives have copies of the 68 Micro
> Journal issue, but they are very low-resolution and very hard to
> read/decipher to transcribe the code from - even by hand - without much
> guessing leading to many possible errors.
>
> The words are fine but the
> code and data are almost unreadable at scale, and too blurry to use if
> zoomed up.
>
> If someone has that code and data and could post it here or on the CoCo
> archive for everyone, that would be most excellent.
>
> Or, if someone has that issue of the magazine and could take high-
> resolution photos of those pages and send them to me or post them on
> the archive ... I could then reconstruct the code and data from there.
>
> For myself, this is an interesting historical artifact for two reasons:
>
> 1. It's the earliest 4-voice sound code/system I have found for the
> 6809/CoCo so far - and seems to have been the inspiration for many
> others such as those later published commercially and in the Rainbow.
>
> 2. It's based directly off of the 1977 Byte magazine article by Hal
> Chamberlin (for 6502/KIM-1) which was a seminal article in the entire
> field of digital music.
>
> Thanks for reading this far and I hope someone can help resurrect this
> particular artifact for the community.
>
> --
> Robert "Exile In Paradise" Murphey <exile at weylan-yutani.com>
> Weylan-Yutani Corporation
>
>
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