Date   : Thu, 28 May 1992 22:12:02 +1300
From   : Pat Cain <cain_p@...>
Subject: Re: Music 500(0) and other ramblings

Well, here's my intro and reply to Ian.

Intro...

I run Sideways BBS (sideways.welly.gen.nz) which is currently running on
a cheap PC.  Sideways is (believe it or not) named after sideways ram on
the beeb--we must have been desperate for a name back in 1988.  Sideways
used to run on my BBC Master under EBBS on 2x640k ADFS discs.  I had
wanted to put a hard drive on the Master and run the BBS on that, but my
power supply died and then I had many other nasty problems with the
machine and it was out of action for around 2 years.  In that time I
bought a cheap PC for the BBS to run on.

Now, this BBS here used to have packs of BBC software on it but we ran
out of disc space so had to move the software to tornado.welly.gen.nz
(neither sideways or tornado are directly connected to internet, so you
can't ftp to them, only mail..) I will be getting a bigger hard disc for
this PC soon and will move the BBC software back here and write a
mailserver so people can request it via e-mail, though I suppose I'll
have to kill off all the pirated games to keep out of trouble.

My BBC Master has a 512 board, mono monitor, 32k extra SRAM, and the
Music 87/500/5000.


Ian writes:
> Has anyone any ideas about how to drive the Music 500(0) without
> using ample.
>
> I've got the thing when it was still the 500, and was pretty
> impressed. I did get a pirate copy of the 5000 stuff, and it's VERY
> impressive, but naturaly there was no upgrade path ad no manuals for
> it.

I bought the 5000 stuff years ago and haven't used it for sometime as my
Master was out out action--fixed now, fortunately.  You're welcome to
have a copy of my software (hope Hybrid don't read this :-).  I've got
lots of ADFS discs of 5000 programs from the Ample user group but gave
up subscribing to them after my Master died.  I didn't bother with MIDI
for various reasons, a friend who was considering a 5000+midi bought an
Atari ST and later Archimedes with MIDI.

I don't know anything about using the 500/5000 without the AMPLE rom,
though the infamous Orlando apparently did quite a bit of work on
playing music without the Ample rom.