

The Mahler Project – The ZX Spectrum Orchestra [video] - AnkhMorporkian
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxPXLIALJJI&feature=youtu.be

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FinnDS
This is great! Didn't know what the ZX Spectrum was, and this was a nice
little video.

One interesting thing is, to me at least - a musician, is that the Spectrums
are not necessarily in tune; the first one playing the melody seems sharper
than all the others. I wonder if the devs were aware of this, and tried fixing
it?..

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Arnt
I doubt that's fixable.

The Spectrum's crystal was chosen for low price, not for closely matching
performance (even day-to-day on the same host), so matching would require
finding the hosts' CPU frequencies at that moment and compensating for the
differences. Possible using the Spectronet, hardly easy.

The Spectrum was a great machine. The kind where the only way to get amazing
results was amazing programming. There was no hardware to help the CPU — if
you wanted to so something, you had to write code. But that's about the only
nice thing I can say about the Spectrum. Build quality, suitability as musical
instrument, and so on and so forth... nah.

~~~
kranner
> the only nice thing I can say about the Spectrum...

A restart was always a button-press away if you messed something up. (At least
the Spectrum+ had a hard reset button on the side). Not to forget that the OS
and BASIC environment were in ROM and took a fraction of a second to boot.

~~~
ptaipale
In the original Spectrum, there was no reset button. Nor was there a power
switch. So if your machine code got stuck, you'd remove the power plug from
the jack and put it back in, to get that power-on self test black screen and
then a BASIC prompt.

And, eventually, the jack would wear out for those of us who wound up with
more bugs than was good for the power jack. Some people actually had to
replace the power jack because of this. You can still get those as spare
parts, btw. [http://www.dataserve-retro.co.uk/contents/en-
uk/d7.html](http://www.dataserve-retro.co.uk/contents/en-uk/d7.html)

~~~
tragomaskhalos
The Z80 has a non-maskable interrupt that jumps to a fixed location in the
ROM, so anyone handy with a soldering iron could have wired up a little push-
button to the NMI pin to trigger it ... in the Specrum ROM this was supposed
to then read an address from a fixed area in the system variables area of RAM
and jump to it, except that due to a bug you could only jump to 0, ie a full
reset. This always seemed a terrible shame.

~~~
ptaipale
Yes, I recall looking at that code in the ROM disassembly and trying to figure
out that what the heck is this supposed to mean.

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pja
Matt's blog post on the topic:

    
    
      http://matt.west.co.tt/spectrum/the-mahler-project/
    

I _think_ I'm visible at the back of the crowd in the video, but the
compression & low light makes it a bit hard to tell!

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DaveSapien
Bhaa, do it with the loading sounds. That would be impressive.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYLoGAL85MI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYLoGAL85MI)

Seriously though, amazing! I would have loved to be involved.

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egypturnash
If you want to just hear it and see the setup without all the preamble, here
it is:
[https://youtu.be/WiFEicJ6grM?t=6m57s](https://youtu.be/WiFEicJ6grM?t=6m57s)

(Starts at 6:57 if that part of the link doesn't work.)

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tomd
Trivia / plug: Matthew Westcott, the creator of this project, is also the lead
developer on [https://wagtail.io/](https://wagtail.io/)

