Richard Bettis
In AMPLINEX 009, Ian Guinan informed us that the waveform
creation facilities of the Music 500 could be used to load waveforms into the synthesiser
hardware, and that altering the Music 5000 !BOOT file so that C.PREPARE was
omitted allowed these waveforms to remain and be used via the predefined Music
5000 sound words (Bright, Broad, etc.).
This procedure does have some other side effects, however,
even though the idea is rather clever!
The C.PREPARE program has four main functions:
1) To set up the waveforms
2) To change the value of OSHWM (the value given by PAGE in
BASIC), as described on page 89 of the Music 5000 User Guide
3) To program the function keys for the Music 5000
environment, (MAIN, "GET, "NAME etc.)
4) To program the special characters used in the Staff
editor.
Of these, the last three can be turned on or off by
including key letters in the call to C.PREPARE.
The default call is */C.PREPARE R S K.
‘R’ tells the program to adjust OSHWM to &1300 if it is
at &1900, giving AMPLE an extra 1300 or so bytes of free memory.
‘S’ tells it to set up the 'soft' characters for the Staff
editor (this takes back much of the memory freed by R!).
‘K’ tells the program to set up the function keys.
Any of these letters can be deleted from the command line.
The Music 5000 User Guide (page 89) gives some circumstances when R should be omitted,
though the example of the altered line is wrong.
However, the waveform set-up is performed whatever other
options are requested.
All this has three important implications.
Firstly, if you don't use the Staff editor, you can gain
extra working space by deleting the 'S' option.
Secondly, if the call to C.PREPARE is removed from the !BOOT
file the Staff editor cannot be used, and the extra memory cannot be freed by
the 'R' option.
Finally, in order to keep the Music 500 waveforms, C.PREPARE
has to be omitted, despite these disadvantages.
In order to solve these problems, I have created a program
to alter the original C.PREPARE file, as supplied by Hybrid, to produce a new
file called C.PREPNEW which will perform all the other functions of C.PREPARE, but
will leave any Music 500 generated waveforms intact.
Instructions and further explanation are provided in the
program (U.Prepper). All you need to do is to LOAD in the program, make sure
your system disc is in the default drive, and RUN it.
Note that if this is used for an initial start-up, when the
synthesiser unit has not been programmed with any waveforms, then all the waveforms
will be created from (presumably) the random state after the electronics was powered
up. (All the waveforms will produce a similar, 'Metal'-like but very weedy
bleep.)
Used after a Music 500 waveform programming session,
however, it should provide a useful addition to Ian Guinan's original
technique.
Related file on this disc:
Published in AMPLINEX 013, September
1989
