Reddit Holiday Music Week VI

[Fletch]

I've submitted an Atari ST entry into the /r/Retrobattlestations Holiday Music Week contest on Reddit.

 

​I wrote a program in GFA BASIC on my Atari ST that plays Silent Night on my Roland MT-32 and displays a picture of Christmas Balls I photographed with an Apple QuickTake 200.

I needed to learn how to program MIDI control codes as well the corresponding MIDI notes. I had difficulty locating any information on how to do this from BASIC, but through trial and error and quite a bit of luck was able to get the MT-32 to play the tune. I am not very good at reading music, so the process of creating a tune was long for me. I'm sure it would be much easier for someone who can actually read music.

I then imported the photo in to my ST via the ComputerEyes Digitizer and saved the image as a Neochrome file.

Once that was done, back in GFA BASIC I added some code to load the Neochrome pictures into the program. I then added some some lyrics and text and set up the video shoot for the contest.

I am not much of a programmer, but enjoyed learning how to make the MT-32 make sounds and then making it play a tune from BASIC.

Below is a link to the video as well as the Reddit post.

https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/a7igi7/atari_st_roland_mt32_silent_night/

[Wally1]

That was great!

 

Keep up the good work!

 

Walt

[+DarkLord]

Nicely done!

[+Sauron]

I saw that on Reddit. Looks and sounds quite nice. You should practice more with sending MIDI data to the MT-32 to get the timing down better, but otherwise it's a great start.

[Fletch]

I saw that on Reddit. Looks and sounds quite nice. You should practice more with sending MIDI data to the MT-32 to get the timing down better, but otherwise it's a great start.

 

 

Trouble is that I have zero musical ability. I am tone deaf, don't read music well, and honestly cannot program beyond a rudimentary level. I just made the whole thing for fun.

 

I continued the fun by programming another entry with my Portfolio. I'm sure this one has an equal number of issues, but oddly I enjoyed making the little Portfolio beep crappy tones than I did having the MT-32 play music.