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[Francois]

OK, thanks. I still have my old faithful 4Mb ST.

[Daz]

Aha ... so maybe you can answer a question for me ... how do you use these Desk Accessory (.acc) files ?

Thanks,

Daz.

[chorg]

Daz

[Daz]

Thanks mate ... actually the Synthworks format was not as weird as it seemed ... it just appeared to be a header and then the sysex

There are two different formats used for the GenEdit/GenPatch stuff seemingly. Where the data is captured as a user dump (.US1) the data is the raw sysex with a header. For the files that (maybe?) used the GenEdit M1 template the data is stored in a slight different format, where the sysex has been de-sevenized (i.e. all the data has the encoding removed that stops any data from accidentally appearing as MIDI status bytes)

Any notes you have on the GenEdit/GenPatch and Synthworks formats would be welcome ! Thanks.

Daz.

[chorg]

Daz

I'll check if I've got any details about the GenEdi/GenPatch formats and get back to you.

Meanwhile, since Francois doesn't seem to be here at the moment to reply to your question about Atari accessories, here's a quick overview.

Accessories were loaded at boot time and had to be in the root directory of the boot disc. They would then show in the "Desk" menu. There was a limit to how many could be loaded - I can't remember how many, at the moment.

There were also accessories whose only purpose was to let you load other accessories later: I used one called MultiDesk and would generally have that loaded along with one or two that were particularly relevant to whatever software I was running. Since I (like most users) had no hard drive, I would have separate boot floppies for different applications, such as Cubase or a word processor, and the root directories would contain the accessories most appropriate to the task.

Accessories did a lot of things from quite mundane to really elaborate. One I liked and often used was a free one from Steinberg called Satellite which did various SysEx things.

The point of accessories came from the fact that you could only run one ordinary program (ie not an accessory) at once; accessories gave a partial way round that, especially the ones like MultiDesk. For instance, more than once I found that I couldn't save a Cubase sequence because there wasn't enough room on the floppy disks I was using - no hard drive. I was able to format a floppy via an accessory.

Clive

[Francois]

Besides what Chord told you, acccessories are a bit like the old Apple Menu in System 7 (remember this ?). You could place suitcases and various other items that could be accessed from the Apple.

[Francois]

BTW, my ST has a SCSI hard drive (external). An incredible 230Mb worth of space. Really HUGE !!!

[Daz]

Thanks guys ... this is a whole new world.

The only "old school" music computer I ever had back in those days was a s/h Yamaha CX-5M ... but as a guitarist I never really got into it and sold it

Daz.

[Tomcat]

Daz, how did you get copies of the old Notator and Cubase for Atari programs? If they are available anywhere, I would like to get them to play around with using the emulatorl.

Thanks,
Tom
_________________
Bigger is not always better

[chorg]

[Daz]

[Daz]

Thanks Clive ... very useful information. From the C source code of GenEdit I've found some good information about it's format.

Thanks too for the tip on installing Desk Accessories ... that worked perfectly. I installed the Hybrid Art's SysXpress doodah and had some good success with converting the GenPatch and GenEdit flavoured files to raw sysex. Steem has a cool feature where you can direct all output to the Atari's MIDI port directly to a file on your Windows file system. So I sent a couple of those file you gave me to the MIDI port using SysXpress and they were dumped into a file on my Windows file system as raw sysex. Pending any changes to my code this might be a good way to convert stuff if you need to do it right now.

Daz.

[Tomcat]

Thanks, Daz! Man, those things are TINY!!!! Oh for the good old days when a very good program would fit on ONE floppy!

Tom
_________________
Bigger is not always better

[Francois]

[chorg]