Last week I posted possibly the most tedious Basic type-in listing ever to World Of Spectrum:
(continues for approx 1500 more lines)
Anyone typing it in in its entirety would be rewarded with this:
Not bad for an evening’s work. Mind you, I did take an ever so teeny shortcut, by writing a Ruby program to convert a MIDI file to BEEP format. (Any .mid file will do, although ones with a single instrument will survive the rather primitive selective-note-butchering process better. Oh, and anything much longer than this one will exceed the 48K Spectrum memory…) And now you can try it out too:
- Midibeep source/downloads at Github
- Midibeep Windows build (thanks to Karl McNeil)
- Minute Waltz (TAP, 38K)
That is awsome!
You know what would also be awesome? Give the listing to someone to type in and when they were done tell them about Midibeep!
No, that’s just just plain mean actually, I don’t mean it ;)
Gasman, you’re crazy! Really loved it :)
Oh, shoot.
And that’s still one audible channel!
You’re a dangerous man.
And actually the music has some weird charm in it.
But does it merge many channels into one automatically or the musician has to do that?
Wouldn’t using DATA statments instead lower the memory usage?
KLP2: A bit, yes. You’d still have the numbers eating up space in both ASCII and floating-point form, which you could condense further with VAL (or the nasty trick of putting a 0 there in the ASCII form but poking the real floating-point value – which would eliminate any pretense of it being type-in-able, of course). Better still – and departing even further from pure Basic – would be to come up with an efficient packed byte encoding for the data, to be read via PEEK. But that’s the point at which I decided that I’d spent too long on this already :-)
Amazing! Everything sounds better in a spectrum.