Music on old platforms

music.md

BBC Micro + Music 5000

• Some BBC Micro emulators (including BeebEm and JSBeeb) support Music 5000
• https://8bs.com/emum5000.htm has more emulation instructions

1. Activate Music 5000 support
2. Load the disc.
3. Boot (Shift-Break on the BBC Micro, which corresponds to Shift-F12 in JSBeeb)
4. F9 to start the Jukebox

• JSBeeb with Music 5000 enabled, disk inserted, and autoboot

Commodore 64

• The easiest way to listen to music is DeepSid, which includes HVSC, most of CGSC, and more.
• DeepSid does not support parts of CGSC, such as pictures, scrolling .wds along with the music (although lyrics are shown), and stereo SidPlayer music. My stereo_player_launcher attempts to make those features easier.

PLATO Gooch Synthetic Woodwind

• There were other musical devices for use with PLATO, but I'm unaware of any emulation of those at this time.

1. Make an account on Cyber1 PLATO, or
2. Install PTerm
3. Connect to PLATO. Use an appropriate profile (the default "Default Classic" profile, which has default port 5004 and "Enable GSW" in emulation). Keys: The NEXT key is usually Enter, other keys are usually Ctrl + the first letter of the name. e.g. STOP is Ctrl-S. So Shift-STOP (needed to log in) is Ctrl-Shift-S.
4. Type gswaids, then Ctrl-D (for DATA). You can also find it in the menu system bigjump (type bigjump then Enter/NEXT or Ctrl-D/DATA, press M to see the misc lessons, then gswaids will be there. Type j then the number.
5. Explore! Also check out lesson gswdemo

PDP-1

The PDP-1 was used to play music, but there were different configurations of hardware, and different software players.

The only emulators I know of that support audio as played via PDP-1 are the MiSTer FPGA PDP-1 core and my JS-PDP-1 emulator.

JS-PDP-1

1. Follow instructions on JS-PDP-1 to experience some of the music using one version of music playing software. At this time I am uncertain of the accuracy of my emulator.

MiSTer FPGA PDP-1

I do not have a MiSTer FPGA at this time to test with, and am unsure if the version of the core with audio support is publicly available. There is a YouTube demonstration, however.

Xerox Alto

• The Xerox Alto had a Audio DAC, which the Smalltalk Music System made use of.
• I have only gotten one song to work. I do not know if there is other music that should work and I haven't figured out how, or if hh is the only working song.

1. Install Contralto2. (Contralto 1 sounds choppy to me, and I don't believe the ContrAltoJS supports audio at this time)
2. Download and unzip the music disk
3. Run Contralto2. Configure it as Alto I, with DAC enabled.
4. Load the music disk, then boot the system.
5. Give any date at the prompt.
6. Type @hh@ and press Enter. This is supposed to execute lines from the file hh, but only the first line runs. The first line loads the microcode for Smalltalk.
7. Type resume hh.sv2 and press Enter. This is the second line of hh, and restores the Smalltalk memory image for hh
8. Type hh p followed by the down arrow key. (Pressing down arrow key is by default how you press the LF key in Contralto2. LF in Smalltalk is doit, represented with !. So the command looks like hh p !

PDP-6 and PDP-10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohjoZ5C0HIs https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/6132/AIM-107.pdf

I got another song working on Xerox Alto Smalltalk Music System. Going through systematically to see which ones work and when. Noting that these songs are filin's, which seem to show a variable name when using type whatever.mu