Orchestra-90 CC

[tjewell]

Let me know if you find more files it won't load - I haven't found one yet, but maybe I'm just being lucky.

Converting a TRS-80 Orchestra-90 feels like yet another project - and I have too many already! I think I'll just keep searching for a 90cc and keep my fingers crossed. Oh, and I have both a 32 and a 64 (lucky me!).

[pser1]

Hi Tony,
I have got the same problem ... most common problem for all of us. Tempus fugit!
I was thinking that having a D64 then switching to MAP1 and copying at $C000 the ROM from the Orchestra90cc
it could work by calling it from inside an IRQ routine to have the very same start that it has on the Dragon.

cheers
pere

[sorchard]

Another interesting thing to try would be to patch the ROM to use the Dragon's internal DAC. It won't be quite as good as the Orchestra-90 hardware but still very usable. I'll have a go at disassembling the ROM to see what I can find.

[pser1]

Hello Tony,
I have used your new asc2cas v1.1 and processed all the .ASC files in that web
They are in the attachment, in the same folder names as the original.
I have not yet tested them. There are 2488 files, so quite a lot to test if
we want to find any that could have given problems in the conversion process

Due to the script I have used to convert all of the files in a folder, and as the pearl
program takes the first 8 chars of the name, all of the songs have a name like that:
SCORES\x
Being the first 7 the global folder and 'x' is a one letter subfolder that contains
all the songs that begin with this letter. So alll the sons in the same folder will
have been saved with same name ... sorry!
This means that after having mounted any .cas file, to load it you should write:
R *
And that's all

cheers
pere

[tjewell]

Wonderful stuff! I could probably re-write my little script to pick the file name a little more intelligently - don't know if you'd want to re-convert all the files if I did though! (how long did it take?).

Once I've got gdb running on my Mac, I'll have a look at that keyboard translation issue. I also rather like Sorchard's idea of using the internal DAC too. Now we have quite a resource of tunes we can play, it would be nice to have a solution that isn't hardware dependent. I also have (somewhere) some details on how to build a AD/DA board for the Dragon, maybe Orchestra could be ported to that too! (I had great plans, back in the 80s, to use the Dragon as a sampler - the Fairlight sampler, beloved of many an 80s musician, was based on the 6809 after all!).

[pser1]

It is incredibly fast, but as there are a lot of folders, I had to call your script once for each.
I am planning to copy all of the ASC files into just one folder and then convert them one shot
with a modified bat file that will not add any folder name.
I think that you don't need to change anything.
Let me a bit of time to copy and reprocess, I will tell you the results
thanks a lot

cheers
pere

[pser1]

alright, done!
here is the new version of files, having each one the correct filename inherited

cheers
pere

[pser1]

Hi Tony
back again,
I would like to convert all of these .cas files to .wav so that they could be loaded either into a real Dragon or CoCo computer.
I am not sure if the header of these .cas files will be long enough to guarantee the detection of the beginning of the file
when loading them.
As it would be very simple to add a fixed number of $55 in front of these files, I was just trying to find out what would be the
best number of bytes to be added ...
In the archive we have cas files with headers of very different length.
So, any advice on the minimum but working length header?

cheers
pere

[sixxie]

You could use XRoar for this maybe (yeah yeah I'm a one-trick pony...):

Code: Select all

xroar -nodos -tape-rewrite -tape-write filename.wav -type 'SKIPF\n' -timeout-motoroff 1 filename.cas

Edit: except... there seems to be a bug

[pser1]

Hi Ciaran,
I hadn't spotted this possibility.
Would it work from inside a command file so that I can call XRoar with some 2448 different files?
I thought it had to be done one at a time and this will be painful, for sure!

thanks beforehand
cheers
pere