#MIDI, Comal, AMICUS
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I bumped into the guy who sells COMAL here in the U.S. His license plate is
COMAL 1, so I knew it was him… He was walking into the local AMIGA dealer.
He said someone in Sweden was working on the Amiga port. Some else asked about
MIDI – a MIDI driver is simple for any computer that can handle the baud rate –
about 31 K baud. All it takes is a couple optoisolators to keep the signals
straight, and then out to the five-pin DIN. The ST really has very little
built-in to drive the MIDI port – just some simple grab-a-byte-and-timestamp-it
and send-a-byte routines. MIDI is much more than that, as you might expect. I
have been employed for the last year and a half producing a MIDI editor for the
IBM, using a Roland MPU-401 MIDI box, which handles the low-l level MIDI calls
for you. It still required a driver in 8088 assembly language of about 2 K,
and our our total source code in C tops out at about 1 Meg, compiled down to
155 K. It takes alot to do MIDI – a lot of program, and a lot of memory.
Cherry Lane Technologies offers a MIDI adapter for the Amiga for about $50. As
for AMICUS, things proceed apace. One disk of Public Domain software is full,
and another is filling up, not to count all the Tech BBS goodies for registered
developers. I'll be writing for Amazing Computing, a new Amiga magazine, and
it looks like A.C. will also be distributing the AMICUS public domain disks…
I'll have an article in the next AmigaWorld, on digital sound synthesis. If you
are porting public domain code, please get in touch with me! Shareware is o.k.,
too.