DSP Robotics Support

tulamide wrote:Later on the Atari 520 I already was using a function-driven basic (way ahead of its time, but forgot the name), but learned to save on RAM (using nibbles instead of bytes and bitmasks and such weird stuff) to realize a full-featured 3-track "Tracker", that used the in-built OSCs to create the sounds. 3 mono tracks of realtime processed sounds! Who would even spend a second on something like that today?

Heh. Anybody here old enough to recognize the phrase "line printer music"?

That was where you fed a block of punch-cards into a mainframe, and the printout made the chains in the line-printer 'ring' to make notes to play a song.

deraudrl wrote:Heh. Anybody here old enough to recognize the phrase "line printer music"?

For anyone who hasn't encountered this before - feast your ears!... YouTube: Rocky's Printer - Eye of the Tiger on a dot matrix printer.

Back when I used to be a CNC machine programmer/operator, I quite often used to know that something wasn't right because the machine wasn't "singing" the tune that it was supposed to.

trogluddite wrote:For anyone who hasn't encountered this before - feast your ears!... YouTube: Rocky's Printer - Eye of the Tiger on a dot matrix printer.

Don't you dare forgetting the greatest orchestra of all time - The Floppotron

Here performing "Beat it" by Michael Jackson, and if you think it will surrender to the famous guitar solo, you better listen to the whole thing!
https://youtu.be/6B522GbH3D8

Then as now, geeks with too much time on their hands.

The very definition of "old school": http://www.righto.com/2019/09/risky-lin ... e-ibm.html

The IBM 1401 was the first computer I ever programmed, over 50 years ago (high school). They could also make music with it by "transmitting" direct to radio, but I never saw that: "Programmers also used the 1401 to generate music on an AM radio via RF interference. Running the right instruction sequence generated a particular tone. We hope to try this in the future." (from the link above)

Thank you both, those had me grinning from ear to ear (and disappearing down the Google rabbit hole for a while - I'll wear out Wikipedia's "vintage computer gear" pages one of these days!)