RetroChallenge 2010

Undisputed... unbeaten... unchallenged, even!

As luck would have it I was able to logon for the Hunt championship match 
-- a feat which proved a little too challenging for the vacationing 
wgoodf. As a result I am, by virtue of being the only competitor, now the 
King of the Hunt!

ALL HAIL ME!

It's a hollow victory, I'll admit, but a victory none-the-less and it 
means I'm able to exit the RetroChallenge with my head held high...

SO LONG SUCKERS!

I managed to scrape up a couple hours of free time yesterday and ploughed 
ahead with my Drumulator project... I got a real quick'n'dirty pattern 
editor cobbled together and succeeded in cranky out a short drum solo. 
Nothing spectacular, but it does sort of demo the capabilities of the 
machine. That is, it would if I had any way to get a decent recording of 
it. I'm afraid all I have by way of proof is a crappy phone video with 
dancing children in it.

 F=  13360.00  X=  67977.33  Y=      0.00     ALT  -75.VSI00-0.0000000000
DX=    252.00 DY=   -149.33 BR=      0.00          .        .
LA=      0.00 VT=      0.00 HT=      0.00          -50.00000-5.0000000000
         CONTACT                                   .        .
You have CRASHED!                                  -25.00000-10.0000000000
67977.3333 metres from the landing site            .        .
You left a crater 373.333333 metres deep          >-0.00000V-15.0000000000

Yes, I'm still absolutely hopeless at Lunar Lander, but I did get 
Urbancamo's final version installed... not sure if the tape displays at 
the left are working properly, but they do add a lot to the feel of being 
at the controls of a 40-year-old spaceship -- at least it's a constant 
reminder of how utterly out of my depth and doomed I am, just like it 
would be in a real spaceship... or an oil tanker... or a tandem bicycle... 
well, you get the idea.

Sadly, this is going to be the extent of my RetroChallenge accomplishments 
as I'm pretty much stuffed for the rest of the month... Thursday is parade 
day, so the kids are going to keep me in check; Friday is a double-shift 
day; Saturday I have to attend a birthday party with a bunch of lesbians 
and Sunday is my mom's 65th birthday (there won't be any lesbians there, 
though)... so basically this is me signing off.

Come to think of it, I probably won't even make the Hunt tournament on 
Saturday, so there's every chance that some plonker like wgoodf will claim 
the title just by showing up... 

GOODBYE CRUEL RETROCHALLENGE!

Forgot the link to Urbancamo's blog...

...and honour is satisfied.

I'm so far away from my RetroChallenge goals that I've decided to steal 
someone else's work and hope nobody notices...

Looking at Urbancamo's Lunar Lander code, I realized it's written in BBC 
basic which just so happens to be one of the dialects installed on 
RetroNET... so I set myself to the arduous task of copying and pasting the 
code. I have to admit that I was just the slightest bit shocked that it 
worked right off the bat. At least I *think* it works -- I'm useless at 
this sort of thing, so all I've managed to do so far is crash.

For RetroNET users, Lunar Lander is now #8 on the games menu... enter "8?" 
for the documentation. For those of you who don't have a RetroNET account, 
go sign up... it's free!

Things have a bit lacking on the retro front of late... the wife and kids 
got back from a month-long vacation in Miami a few days ago, so I've 
mostly been hanging out with the kids. Now, with less than a week to go, I 
need to get back in the groove or I'll end up with nothing to show.

About the only thing I've done this weekend is pack up about ten years 
worth of retrocomputing accretions and stash boxes in pretty much every 
available nook and cranny... my eldest daughter is turning eleven in a 
couple of weeks and gets to have her own room -- at my expense. 

Still, I came across quite a lot of junk that I'd forgotten all about... 
like half a dozen NadaNet adaptors that I ordered a couple years back and 
never got round to using. Maybe something for the winter RC...

Well, there's an evening shot... some kind soul (who shall remain 
anonymous) mailed me a disk image of Passport Designs MIDI/8+, along with 
a link to instructions on how to deprotect the software. Super! Great! 
Outstanding!

Except it doesn't work... not sure what's going wrong, but I've followed 
the [quite simple] instructions to the letter and have succeeded in 
unlocking the splash screen, but after that it crashes into the monitor. 
It really looks as though the problem lies with the original disk image, 
in which case I'm hooped.

I'm hanging up my pirate hat!

You know how they say trouble comes in threes? I suppose my primary work computer crashing would 
the obligatory third tragedy... grrrr!

Well, it's not as bad as it could be... I don't have to reinstall the OS or anything like that, but 
it will take me a while to get back up to speed on the half-dozen-or-so jobs that I was working on 
simultaneously because everyone wants everything done NOW!

In the meantime, there's no sign of my borther-in-law's Mennonite buddy who's supposed to be fixing 
the car and I haven't heard squat from the insurance adjuster regarding my drippy roof... I'm having 
a shit day, but tomorrow could well be a lot worse, so I'll make the most of what I have.

It's still raining... roof's still leaking and now my car's borked. I
think it's timing, brother-in-law says fuel pump. We'll spend a fortune
fixing both only to find out it's something else... so it goes.

Needless to say I haven't done anything fun today.

If I were a boxer, I think that would be my nom de guerre... but I'm not. 
Seriously, we're having some absolutely dreadful weather here -- the 
roof's leaking and water's rising in the basement... I've just spent the 
last four hours lugging my more precious junk upstairs to safety. I'm 
tired, cranky and sore, but the upside is that all of my music gear is now 
nicely arranged in the living room, which I'm officially renaming as the 
music room -- the wife is going to be ever so happy when she gets back 
from her holidays!

Looking over my fairly formidable collection of Apple II noise makers, 
I've finally decided on the specific form of my RetroChallenge entry: I'm 
going to attempt to record a piece of "music" that uses everything in the 
arsenal... that would include:

* Drumulator (naturally)
* alphaSyntauri synthesizer
* Decillionix DX-1 sampler
* Echo II speech synthesizer

and, if I can find them:

* S.A.M. speech synth
* Gavo's old Mockingboard

plus whatever software gets in the way.

That, of course, assuming my roof doesn't blow off or a tree come crashing 
through the living room window...

Togart was lamenting the current lull in teh RetroChallenge over on the
BBS and sent out a general request for more cowbell... well, here's some:

It turns out my problem was with a pair of nested loop that weren't nested
properly... I had to resort to counting on my fingers (seriously, one hand
was the x register and the other the y register...), but in the end I've
achieved limited success.

I'm actually more than a little pleased with this turn of events as it
means a) no more brain-boiling assembly for a while and b) I may just be a
little bit smarter than I thought I was...

Did I say success? I meant failure...

I finished (or so I thought) my assembly language midi sequencer today and 
was really quite excited when I ran it and the Drumulator made a sound, 
followed by not another sound... just the silence of the prairie broken by 
the occasional plaintive cry of a lonesome dove.

I've managed to get as far as initializing the midi card and sending a 
cluster of notes to it, but then it evidently enters an infinite loop -- 
and I'll be buggered if I can figure out how that's happening. What I need 
here is a debugger, so I won't be buggered anymore, but I don't have one 
handy at the moment.

You'll no doubt be thrilled to know that I made a video of my failure... 
don't waste your time -- go look at porn instead!

So I finally got down to doing some work on my midi sequencer only to 
remember how difficult 6502 assembly can be for someone with limited math 
and logic skills... hard to believe that I spent a solid four hours at it 
and only got about half done. Tomorrow I'll take another look at it and 
no doubt discover the inevitable flaw in the logic that will render the 
whole thing useless... *sigh*

Not that I'm lacking a progress report, just that I'm reporting a lack of 
progress. Sadly work has intervened and my grandiose plans look a little 
rocky at the moment... still, lots of good stuff on off from the other 
RetroChallengers so go check them out!

Instead of catching up on a backlog of work today, I fiddled about with my 
plans for the Drumulator MIDI Sequencer... I don't think there's anything 
earth-shatteringly complicated in this projects, but it is likely to be a 
bit time consuming... so I thought I'd take another stab at tracking down 
something pre-existing. Unfortunately the internet leaves something to be 
desired in this respect, so I posted a plea on comp.sys.apple2. In the 
meantime I'm forging ahead with rolling my own, but I'm hopeful that 
something will come up so I can spend the rest of the month actually 
making music instead of just programming...

...so no video today.

Okay, here's the plan:

I've established that I can control the Drumulator with MIDI, so the next 
step is to write a decent pattern/song editor and sequencer. Fortunately 
this is something I've played about with numerous times in the past, so I 
have a bit of a head-start. The challenge is that in the past I've only 
worked with monophonic samples, whereas with the Drumulator I have to 
accommodate the possibility of triggering up to 12 sounds simultaneously. 
As is always the case with Apple II programming, I'll be working within 
some fairly tight memory constraints... fun! fun! fun!

After fiddling about with the Korg 800 sequencer software and looking 
about the net for other possible contenders, I realized that I was 
unlikely to find anything properly suited to my needs... which means I'm  
going to have to roll my own.

It turns out that this may be much less complicated than I imagined... the
Passport MIDI card manual includes a sample AppleSoft program that I was 
able to eviscerate, and in no time at all I actually managed to gain 
control of the Drumulator.

Not a bad start, I have to say. Of course AppleSoft is a bit slow for 
anything requiring precise timing, but as a proof-of-concept it works. The
next step will be to figure out how to do the same thing in assembly, 
which is likely to be a bit of a task, but at the moment I'm feeling 
unusually confident -- surely things will return to normal soon enough.

I needed another MIDI cable to properly hook-up the Passport MIDI card, 
but it turns out I bought the last one at the music shop last week... this 
means that I'm not actually able to do much with the Drumulator at this 
point, but I was able to connect my daughter's Yamaha keyboard to the 
Apple IIe and load some of the sample songs from the Korg 800 MIDI 
Sequencer diskette. I even made a couple of demo videos:

That's all for now...

Why, it's the sweet smell of limited success!

After initially giving up on MIDI, I spent most of the evening trying to 
establish a serial dialog with the Drumulator... sadly my advances went 
unnoticed, in spite of sweating through the construction of a really ace 
cable and even putting fresh battery in my multimeter... the Drumulator 
was simply having none of it. So it goes...

Back to MIDI, then! This time I spent a few minutes reading the manual for 
my tiny little MIDI keyboard, and wouldn't you know it - I was doing it 
all wrong! No surprise there... anyhow, after figuring out that I had to 
hit the proper keys, the Drumulator was pounding it out like a champ. Yay 
me!

Of course this isn't really the goal... it's just a step in the right 
direction. Tomorrow I'll tackle hooking up the Drumulator to the Apple 
II-hosted Passport MIDI interface and see what happens.

Well, as is traditional, the first day of the RetroChallenge happily 
coincides with our Canada Day (Dominion Day) celebrations... beer, 
barbeques and fireworks -- followed by mass arrests of Medieval 
re-enactment buffs and other threatening dissidents.

Anyway, as is also traditional, my RetroChallenge got off to a rocky 
start. My big plan this time round is to finally figure out some way of 
controlling my Drumulator drum machine with an Apple II. I have two 
options here: I can either write my own sequencer and control the thing 
via serial comms, or I can use MIDI to control it. Since MIDI already 
exists, I thought I'd take a stab at that... first, here's everything I 
know about MIDI:

Did you catch that? I won't repeat it... suffice to say that I've never 
used MIDI to do anything, although I do own a few bits of MIDI gear and 
even spent $12 on a cable the other day. I was lucky enough to find a 
YouTube video of someone using MIDI with a Drumulator, so I figured I'd be 
in clover. Turns out I was wrong -- my rig does nothing, and I have no 
idea even where to start troubleshooting.

Assuming I don't figure it out (which is a fair assumption), that leaves 
me with the somewhat more involved option of figuring out serial 
control... good thing I have nothing else planned for this month!

This is just basically a test post to make sure I've got my blogging 
script set-up properly (which would be a minor miracle)...

For anyone who may be unaccountably interested in my current 
RetroChallenge exploits, the plan this year is to make music of some sort
using primarily Apple II computers. That's all I really know at this 
point... I tend to be all over the place stylistically, but whatever comes
out of this, I can almost guarantee you won't be able to dance to it.

Let the games begin...