On 12/7/2022 at 10:07 AM, Jestin said:
I really like the idea of being able to hand children a manual have let them play around with sound. For that purpose, I'm obviously in favor of the BASIC commands.
I'm also in favour of basic like commands - consider myself as a child when it comes to making music.
In the Vic-20 example it at least has some UI, so that I can see what I'm doing (playing with) - choosing 1 of 4 voices modifying what pitch to put int that voice. I believe the manual explains what voice is, but to a "lay child" a voice is what one speaks with. Remember that the Vic 20 had to introduce computers, programming and BASIC to the mass consumer market, all under the guise of the "friendly computer."
I can't get any musical idea of the current example from the X16 listing. It looks like it loads some magic bytes into magic registers. It's almost machine code - placing values in memory locations. Perhaps the text in the document leading to this example might explain it better than the code does. I hope it's just one of many examples that are explained in the documentation.
In the third example the proposed BASIC commands seem to make sense to me, as the naming of them is descriptive. Having commands means that they can be looked up in a manual for what each parameter means. Hopefully it eventually gets supported in the 1.1 ROMs after the X16 releases. That would be something for the children, like myself.