The Mahler Project – The ZX Spectrum Orchestra [video]
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Re: The Mahler Project – The ZX Spectrum Orchestra [video]
#2If you want to just hear it and see the setup without all the preamble, here it is: https://youtu.be/WiFEicJ6grM?t=6m57s
(Starts at 6:57 if that part of the link doesn't work.)
Re: The Mahler Project – The ZX Spectrum Orchestra [video]
#3This is great! Didn't know what the ZX Spectrum was, and this was a nice little video.
One interesting thing is, to me at least - a musician, is that the Spectrums are not necessarily in tune; the first one playing the melody seems sharper than all the others. I wonder if the devs were aware of this, and tried fixing it?..
Re: The Mahler Project – The ZX Spectrum Orchestra [video]
#4This is great! Didn't know what the ZX Spectrum was, and this was a nice little video. One interesting thing is, to me at least - a musician, is that the Spectrums are not necessarily in tune; the first one playing the melody seems sharper than all the others. I wonder if the devs were aware of this, and tried fixing it?..
I doubt that's fixable.
The Spectrum's crystal was chosen for low price, not for closely matching performance (even day-to-day on the same host), so matching would require finding the hosts' CPU frequencies at that moment and compensating for the differences. Possible using the Spectronet, hardly easy.
The Spectrum was a great machine. The kind where the only way to get amazing results was amazing programming. There was no hardware to help the CPU — if you wanted to so something, you had to write code. But that's about the only nice thing I can say about the Spectrum. Build quality, suitability as musical instrument, and so on and so forth... nah.
Re: The Mahler Project – The ZX Spectrum Orchestra [video]
#5This is great! Didn't know what the ZX Spectrum was, and this was a nice little video. One interesting thing is, to me at least - a musician, is that the Spectrums are not necessarily in tune; the first one playing the melody seems sharper than all the others. I wonder if the devs were aware of this, and tried fixing it?..
I doubt that's fixable. The Spectrum's crystal was chosen for low price, not for closely matching performance (even day-to-day on the same host), so matching would require finding the hosts' CPU frequencies at that moment and compensating for the differences. Possible using the Spectronet, hardly easy. The Spectrum was a great machine. The kind where the only way to get amazing results was amazing programming. There…
You're right, the Oric-1 was a much better machine.
Re: The Mahler Project – The ZX Spectrum Orchestra [video]
#6This is great! Didn't know what the ZX Spectrum was, and this was a nice little video. One interesting thing is, to me at least - a musician, is that the Spectrums are not necessarily in tune; the first one playing the melody seems sharper than all the others. I wonder if the devs were aware of this, and tried fixing it?..
I doubt that's fixable. The Spectrum's crystal was chosen for low price, not for closely matching performance (even day-to-day on the same host), so matching would require finding the hosts' CPU frequencies at that moment and compensating for the differences. Possible using the Spectronet, hardly easy. The Spectrum was a great machine. The kind where the only way to get amazing results was amazing programming. There…
> the only nice thing I can say about the Spectrum...
A restart was always a button-press away if you messed something up. (At least the Spectrum+ had a hard reset button on the side). Not to forget that the OS and BASIC environment were in ROM and took a fraction of a second to boot.
Re: The Mahler Project – The ZX Spectrum Orchestra [video]
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt that's fixable. The Spectrum's crystal was chosen for low price, not for closely matching performance (even day-to-day on the same host), so matching would require finding the hosts' CPU frequencies at that moment and compensating for the differences. Possible using the Spectronet, hardly easy. The Spectrum was a great machine. The kind where the only way to get amazing results was amazing programming. There…
> the only nice thing I can say about the Spectrum... A restart was always a button-press away if you messed something up. (At least the Spectrum+ had a hard reset button on the side). Not to forget that the OS and BASIC environment were in ROM and took a fraction of a second to boot.
Yes... it was friendly to budding hackers like myself in many ways. Pretty clearly intended to be a computer, not what another commenter calls "better machine".
Re: The Mahler Project – The ZX Spectrum Orchestra [video]
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt that's fixable. The Spectrum's crystal was chosen for low price, not for closely matching performance (even day-to-day on the same host), so matching would require finding the hosts' CPU frequencies at that moment and compensating for the differences. Possible using the Spectronet, hardly easy. The Spectrum was a great machine. The kind where the only way to get amazing results was amazing programming. There…
> the only nice thing I can say about the Spectrum... A restart was always a button-press away if you messed something up. (At least the Spectrum+ had a hard reset button on the side). Not to forget that the OS and BASIC environment were in ROM and took a fraction of a second to boot.
In the original Spectrum, there was no reset button. Nor was there a power switch. So if your machine code got stuck, you'd remove the power plug from the jack and put it back in, to get that power-on self test black screen and then a BASIC prompt.
And, eventually, the jack would wear out for those of us who wound up with more bugs than was good for the power jack. Some people actually had to replace the power jack because of this. You can still get those as spare parts, btw. http://www.dataserve-retro.co.uk/contents/en-uk/d7.html
Re: The Mahler Project – The ZX Spectrum Orchestra [video]
#9Trivia / plug: Matthew Westcott, the creator of this project, is also the lead developer on https://wagtail.io/
Re: The Mahler Project – The ZX Spectrum Orchestra [video]
#10This is great! Didn't know what the ZX Spectrum was, and this was a nice little video. One interesting thing is, to me at least - a musician, is that the Spectrums are not necessarily in tune; the first one playing the melody seems sharper than all the others. I wonder if the devs were aware of this, and tried fixing it?..
I doubt that's fixable. The Spectrum's crystal was chosen for low price, not for closely matching performance (even day-to-day on the same host), so matching would require finding the hosts' CPU frequencies at that moment and compensating for the differences. Possible using the Spectronet, hardly easy. The Spectrum was a great machine. The kind where the only way to get amazing results was amazing programming. There…
Another nice thing to say was that the CPU was clocked balzingly fast for the time period.
Also it has a real actual genuine soul connected to a higher plane of existence that you communed with every time you used it.