4 ms·
Dongles were a thing, certainly the expensive MIDI programs used them. Cubase, Steinberg and C-LAB Creator were the big ones. As I recall, there were tons of b
by car 7mo ago
Dongles were a thing, certainly the expensive MIDI programs used them. Cubase, Steinberg and C-LAB Creator were the big ones.
As I recall, there were tons of books about GEM for the Atari ST, at least in Europe.
- cmrdporcupine 7mo agoMan I spent hours and hours just last month trying to reverse engineer the original Notator/Creator dongle and get Notator to launch in emulation by patching Hatari to emulate the dongle. Codex & Gemini & I had something almost working. That dongle was evil and crazy complex. Fairly complex CPLD that depended on system timing and in the end the emulator just can't fulfill whatever contract the software expects from the bus + the emulated dongle.
- msephton 7mo agoThe dongle has already been reverse engineered in the last couple of years and replicas are for sale.
- cmrdporcupine 7mo agoYes I am aware of this, and read the HDL to understand what they did. But they are hardware only. The point is to run in emulation.
- car 7mo agoIs the software still attractive to use, after all those years, or why are you going to these extremes? Sounds it's somehow intimately intertwined with the dongle, if the check routines can't simply be patched.
- car 7mo agoGoing down this rabbit hole, I realize that ST hardware for musicians is still huge. And the dongles as still working as intended, apparently. And then this blew my mind: https://re-falcon.com https://re-falcon.com Quite the underground scene: https://indyclassic.org https://indyclassic.org
- cmrdporcupine 7mo agoI have two Falcons here they're a compelling machine and still fun to play with. But if I were to ask for a machine repro, a new motherboard, it would be in a different PCB form factor to get it into an ITX or m-ITX case. Because it's the cases and keyboards that go, not the machine.
- steve1977 7mo agoWe almost had something like that with the Medusa and Hades Atari clones.
- cmrdporcupine 7mo agoPeople attempted to patch the routines decades ago and it never produced a stable result.
- zabzonk 7mo ago> As I recall, there were tons of books about GEM for the Atari ST, at least in Europe. Yes, there were, but compared with the Windows textbooks and Microsoft-supplied documentation for Windows, they were really not good. In the UK, they were translated (not well) from German. At least all the ones I owned were almost completely lacking in examples, and examples are really what you want when learning to use something.