Amiga's role in music on The Guardian today

[Adropac2]

could the ST actually do things with midi that Amiga couldn't. I mean are we simply talking about just having midi ports and software or did the ST actually do things that much better. From my brief understanding it seems the ST didn't have an advantage here other than price initially and available software

I used Octamed V5 for example writing using midi on a Yamaha CS1x and a Roland XP50 and appeared to have had good results. I would have perhaps used different some software too but my time was effective and I wonder of the benefits ST had

[robinsonb5]

Originally Posted by Adropac2

From my brief understanding it seems the ST didn't have an advantage here other than price initially and available software.

It did have one easily-overlooked advantage - a high-res flicker-free screenmode that was not just supported but expected by the software. OK, you needed the special monitor - but in a professional setting that's no obstacle.

(Yes, the Amiga could also do a high-res flicker-free screenmode once the ECS chipset arrived - but I don't think it saw much use - if any - before AGA came along. I'd be very interested to know whether anyone actually used an A500+ or A600 in Multiscan Productivity?)

[Jope]

The music ataris I've seen all had the hires monitor with them. :-) Those studio owners mainly used the machine as a sequencer, they weren't necessarily into computers per se.

[Adropac2]

Originally Posted by robinsonb5

It did have one easily-overlooked advantage - a high-res flicker-free screenmode that was not just supported but expected by the software. OK, you needed the special monitor - but in a professional setting that's no obstacle.

(Yes, the Amiga could also do a high-res flicker-free screenmode once the ECS chipset arrived - but I don't think it saw much use - if any - before AGA came along. I'd be very interested to know whether anyone actually used an A500+ or A600 in Multiscan Productivity?)

oh right interesting and the rest was history

[klx300r]

Originally Posted by Ami_GFX

...My A2500 came with a DSS sound sampler and I'm going to have to dig it out and hook it up again. Now that lofi sampling in in vogue, the Amiga actually has some relevance to electronic music these days as well as back in the 90s, weak midi implementation and all. It hadn't occurred to me to get a midi interface and try playing Notator sequences on an Amiga but it could be interesting.

I still have my DSS8+ sampler somewhere in my basement and man that was sooo much fun hooking it up to my CD player and messing around with the crazy sounds ..good times

[Ami_GFX]

I think one thing that favored the ST for midi sequencing is that there wasn't much of an OS and the coders could take liberties with the code that a more structured OS wouldn't allow. Like they could substitute the midi interrupt vector handlers with their own code. The whole OS was in ROM, not just the boot code and Atari didn't care much about it. Atari TOS was the product of a business deal and assembled from pre existing code. Nobody had a vision for the OS like they did for Amiga OS. So the ST coders could do code like they were coding for a dedicated hardware sequencer that had a lot more memory and better display. Notator has special memory requirements and there's a whole list of software that you can't run on your system if you use Notator. Cubase ditched the Atari system fonts and used their own to make it look like a Mac app. That sort of cowboy coding was pretty common on the ST.

[cynix]

The CPLD in the dongle for Cubase 3 on the ST was recently decapsulated, dumped and reversed so after 30 years we finally have a 100% crack. It took over 500 68000 instructions to emulate the dongle hardware logic.

Downloads available here if anyone's interested :
https://sites.google.com/view/ataritosser/downloads

and the dumped CPLD logic file can be found here:
https://megawrzuta.pl/files/6783ce44...386470242c.zip

[TCD]

Watched this couple of moons ago, but I think it's relevant: [ Show youtube player ]

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by Bren McGuire

made my morning to see my favorite computer in the news today:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/20...-calvin-harris

and to think this is still used today to great effect. what a computer.

If anything, the music produced by people like Tangerine Dream using stock Atari STs is better than the unimaginative sounds and melodies in music today lol just like everything filmed in native 4k for 4k TVs is sh*t compared to movies I watched on 28" CRT TVs in the 80s/90s lol so more power doesn't actually make movies/music/TV better

Besides, by the time that MS rubbish recovers from a hibernate operation I have already cold booted a Kickstart AND Workbench 1.3 disk and loaded Deluxe Paint III via floppy disk using just the internal disk drive on my A1000 lol