Subj : Play audio from a serial port
To   : Bob Worm
From : AKAcastor
Date : Sun May 26 2024 15:44:28

 > At our age, how much is there to hear above 7 kHz anyway?  :D

 BW> Heha, well, ironically... despite it now being hard to 
 BW> follow conversations in loud rooms I can still hear 
 BW> those damned mosquito speakers they put in shopping 
 BW> centres to stop teens loitering really clearly. But 
 BW> then, when we went in for the ultrasound for my son 18 
 BW> years ago I could hear that  really clearly - including 
 BW> the pitch changes when they adjusted the depth setting. 
 BW> The little foetus went kind of nuts as well, must be 
 BW> genetic :)

Funny ultrasound story. :)  I don't have ultrasound experience myself, but I can relate somewhat to still having the high frequencies, while noticing it getting harder to follow voices sometimes.  I think I've lost a bit of the high frequencies, but I might still be able to pick up CRT whine if I ever turned one of those back on.

Part of it may be my hearing become more selective as I've found how helpful (and necessary) it is to tune more things out as I've aged.

 > I support your choice of priorities!  Terminal emulator sounds like an
 > important project and deserves attention too.

 BW> Out of interest I tried just adding the serial handler 
 BW> without assembler-ising the code and optimising it. It 
 BW> needs the optimisations :) Or I need to find BBSes that 
 BW> don't send more than one line of text at a time as it 
 BW> can't keep up at volume and just hits the wall. I will 
 BW> probably add a FIFO / circle buffer to soak up bursts 
 BW> as some of the routines are just... slow.

FIFO always ends up being the solution, doesn't it.  It might be worth trying to connect to a CBBS system, I have called into CBBS/TN before and it's a very low bandwidth interface (I also found the late 70s-style BBS surprisingly pleasant to navigate).

CBBS/TN is at cbbs.mitsaltair.com port 8800 or dialup +1 702 216 6148.

 BW> Oh, this is serial. It didn't have a network card when 
 BW> I rescued it from a skip 20 years ago and I've tried to 
 BW> keep it original (other than the essential CF card to 
 BW> IDE adaptor).

I am always conflicted between keeping systems as original as possible, and bolting on every retro-hack I can find. :)

 BW> In theory its serial port can do 19200bps 
 BW> but I believe it's not assured to be stable at that 
 BW> rate so 9600 is the recommended maximum. Once I get all 
 BW> the BASIC out of this it should cope at 9600.

Ohhhh if its running interpreted BASIC I completely understand the serial speed problems.  Based on the serial port speeds I assume there's no UART buffer - sounds like a good test of your optimization abilities!

 BW> FWIW I absolutely love the A3020, and I never even 
 BW> experienced one back in the day so this is objective 
 BW> love rather than nostalgic love :)

If you're thinking about showing it off in videos, I'll be watching. :)


Chris/akacastor

--- Maximus 3.01
 * Origin: Another Millennium - Canada - another.tel (21:1/162)

.