@introspec: hehe thanks It's gonna be a tough battle... TI has nearly the same setup as the Speccy, but it's also nearly twice as fast
garvalf wrote:would the 84+ be much better than the 83+? It's more expensive anyway.
So far the 83+ I got seems ok. It's a "TI-83 Plus.fr" in fact, for making music with the "French Touch"
I got the cable link we talked about. It's working as a "grey link" (serial) cable. I didn't manage to make it work on linux with tilp, but I'll try on another computer. It just says the cable is not connected but my system is detecting it (with dmesg). On windows I got tilp to work (with efforts), I had to test several serial ports. The official TI Connect works the best. (I had to install by hand this driver http://www.prolific.com.tw/US/ShowProdu … mp;pcid=41)
I don't know if a silverlink would have worked better, I've read it was quite complicated to connect to linux. But I'll try more with mine...
Hmm, SilverLink works out-of-the-box for me (Debian+TiLP from the repos). Never had any probs with it.
I think the problem is that the cable is interpreted as serial when it is really USB. On the one hand it's not too surprising because originally GrayLink was a indeed a serial cable. Hmm... maybe you can force TiLP to use it as SilverLink via command line? Otherwise, if problems persist shoot Lionel Debroux (TilP dev) a mail, he's a really nice guy and he might be curious about this cable, too.
A few things which didn't work at first (not your fault):
- The first time I added some new patterns to your sample tune, it could compile but not be executed on the TI83, probably a memory problem. The message during execution was more saying something like "syntax error" so it wasn't easy to understand it was because of this.
Hmm, if there's a memory problem you usually wouldn't be able to transfer it to the machine in the first place. Perhaps you can send me the problematic song file so I can have a look? Maybe I made an error somewhere...
- Adding 2 rawp songs in the TI83 were also filling its memory badly.
Yes, undoubtedly so, because the rawp engine itself is rather huge. Best to recycle the player and just swap out the song data (have a look at rawp.asm, the pointer to the music data is on line 32)
- it's a pity they used those tiny jack connectors. I only found a earphone for using with it, so I'll search more or buy a new converter. When the earphones are connected, the calculator is very unresponsive. Probably with a jack converter it won't do this.
- no speakers on the TI, it's a pity too...
Yes, 2.5mm jack suxx The unresponsiveness is due to the calculator picking up phantom voltage from the earphones. Plugging them in after you've started the shell should help to avoid the problem.
Yeah, my stupid server is down again.
So in conclusion I managed to create some music and send it to the calculator, so I'm quite happy with this. I experienced some heavy detuning in comparison with the sounds on milkytracker so I need to work more with it to learn what works ok and what works less. It sounds amazing anyway, thanks for this work!
Thank you for trying it out! Unfortunately this engine uses 8-bit frequency counters, so detuning is to be expected from upper 3rd octave on. I'm working on a version with 16-bit counters though.
Edit re: 83+ vs 84+. Starting with the 83+ SE, the processor can be used in 15 MHz mode, which is awesome. However, I don't own any calcs of this generation (yet), so I'm not supporting this. Also, the size of the Flash RAM varies among models (though it's not necessarily bigger on 84+ models). Other than that, the 83+ and 84+ are practically identical.