[sdiy] Camel*ont* soft Da synth!

[Richard Wentk]

At 19:40 04/05/2006, Colin f wrote:

>Yes there is. You can have direct access to the hardware from application
>software.
>You don't need to go through a shoddily written 'multimedia' API, plus the
>manufacturers driver.

So what? Everyone and his dog has now managed to get timestamped MIDI 
working accurately on PCs and Macs.

If you want to use something with a 6850 in it for old time's sake, it's 
easy enough to build it yourself. (At least it used to be when you could 
still get them from Maplin.)

Anyway, this is missing the point, because at the time most external 
interfaces used exactly the same approach as the Atari - i.e. an interrupt 
line and UART - only the UART was outside of the case instead of inside it.

Total practical difference -> zero.

>That seems a totally pointless exercise.
>At 120 bpm, a 480 ppqn clock tick lasts 1ms, which is the length of a single
>note message.

Yes, exactly. So the limiting factor was the MIDI stream, not the 
sequencer's internal resolution.

>High timing resolution in a MIDI sequencer is just marketing.

Not when 48ppqn was considered acceptable by almost everyone else in the 
trade, and 120ppqn was considered cutting edge.

Richard