The Meaning of the Commodore
So, you may be asking yourself why I got the Commodore’s out of storage to begin with. Well, it all begins with a few days ago. See, I told myself I was done with the current theater season. Bye Bye Birdie wasn’t that interesting, and I already had lead parts in 2 out of the four productions so far, including a musical, so I needed a break. But, there was a lack of male peeps auditioning for the show, and I was asked to play a small character, Maude, in the show. No problem.
I went to rehearsal Thursday and totally sucked. I haven’t been able to sight read since high school, and even then I was bass and they wanted me to do tenor 2. Eek. So after failing on tenor 2, they put me at the baritone spot (its a quarter) and I still sucked, or rather, I sucked and was unsure of myself… which meant I really sucked.
Enter the Commodore.
Back in the days of QuantumLink, I was a very avid SID arranger. Basically, the Commodore SID chip (still a legend) had 3 native voices and could expand to 6. Making songs sound good with only 3 voices is an art form, and I was into it heavilly in junior high and high school, and made a bunch of SIDs under the name DATASID. Only a few survive to this day.
So, I had a revelation, I would dig out the Commodore, and put my part into the computer! Brilliant! Now, mind you, these are C= 64’s I bought on eBay and not my original system (which was sold at a garage sale in the 90s, how I wish I had her and all my stuff back today). In addition to the 64, I have 2 disk drives, and probably the most important thing - a cable that connects my Commodore disk drive to my old Compaq laptop. Yes, I can download from the INternet directly to a Commodore drive using my PC laptop.
So this morning, instead of hooking the C= up to my big TV, I went to Best Buy and got a small 13″ TV for $69. Sigh. Ok, well, I can use it other places. I then got home and went through the painful process of getting the music editor working. I did have the basic music editor disk, which was awful and a pain to use. I thought I had the Stereo Editor downlaoded already, but I couldn’t find it. So I booted up the laptop and found it online, downloaded it, got it to a disk. But… it is archived.
Commodores used an archaic (even by their standards) of compression that was called LHAarc, and was available in self-extracting or just plain .arc files. You needed a dissolving program to dissolve the un-self-exptracing ones. So, I sorted through the C= library I ripped from the old Ames usergroup and finally found… Omega-Q! Woot! So I went to dissolve, and it wouldnt dissolve onto one disk. Gr. So, I had to hook the drives up and flip switches to get them to use device 8 and 9, and finally everything worked.
After about a dozen reboots for some reason, finally I can get the Stereo Editor to work. Now, I just need to input the damn song so I can learn my notes. I went to WalMart and Kmart tonight threatening to buy a small computer cart to put everything on, but do I really want to spend $30-40 on a computer cart for my Commodore setup? I don’t think it will be out of the closet very often after this is done. But it is kind of fun to play with, and an emulator doesn’t give y ou the same feeling.
So… Long live the Commodore!
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Ahh… that explains it…