Notes on using the Music 500 waveforms

Richard Bettis

In AMPLINEX 009, Ian Guinan informed us that the waveform creation facilities of the Music 500 could be used to load waveforms into the synthesiser hardware, and that altering the Music 5000 !BOOT file so that C.PREPARE was omitted allowed these waveforms to remain and be used via the predefined Music 5000 sound words (Bright, Broad, etc.).

This procedure does have some other side effects, however, even though the idea is rather clever!

The C.PREPARE program has four main functions:

1) To set up the waveforms

2) To change the value of OSHWM (the value given by PAGE in BASIC), as described on page 89 of the Music 5000 User Guide

3) To program the function keys for the Music 5000 environment, (MAIN, "GET, "NAME etc.)

4) To program the special characters used in the Staff editor.

Of these, the last three can be turned on or off by including key letters in the call to C.PREPARE.

The default call is */C.PREPARE R S K.

‘R’ tells the program to adjust OSHWM to &1300 if it is at &1900, giving AMPLE an extra 1300 or so bytes of free memory.

‘S’ tells it to set up the 'soft' characters for the Staff editor (this takes back much of the memory freed by R!).

‘K’ tells the program to set up the function keys.

Any of these letters can be deleted from the command line. The Music 5000 User Guide (page 89) gives some circumstances when R should be omitted, though the example of the altered line is wrong.

However, the waveform set-up is performed whatever other options are requested.

All this has three important implications.

Firstly, if you don't use the Staff editor, you can gain extra working space by deleting the 'S' option.

Secondly, if the call to C.PREPARE is removed from the !BOOT file the Staff editor cannot be used, and the extra memory cannot be freed by the 'R' option.

Finally, in order to keep the Music 500 waveforms, C.PREPARE has to be omitted, despite these disadvantages.

In order to solve these problems, I have created a program to alter the original C.PREPARE file, as supplied by Hybrid, to produce a new file called C.PREPNEW which will perform all the other functions of C.PREPARE, but will leave any Music 500 generated waveforms intact.

Instructions and further explanation are provided in the program (U.Prepper). All you need to do is to LOAD in the program, make sure your system disc is in the default drive, and RUN it.

Note that if this is used for an initial start-up, when the synthesiser unit has not been programmed with any waveforms, then all the waveforms will be created from (presumably) the random state after the electronics was powered up. (All the waveforms will produce a similar, 'Metal'-like but very weedy bleep.)

Used after a Music 500 waveform programming session, however, it should provide a useful addition to Ian Guinan's original technique.

Related file on this disc:

U.Prepper - utility to create new version of C.PREPARE file which does not load Music 5000 waveforms