ORCHestra 80/85/90 Page

This page deals with the TRS-80's Orchestra 80/85/90/90CC.

The ORCH 80/85/90/90CC was a product of Software Affair, which allowed for 4 or 5 (depending on the model) simultaneous voices of music. Bryan Eggers and Jon Bokelman were the principals of that company.

If you get a message that the table is empty, then there are no files for your criteria. To see ALL entries, you can just hit submit.

CMD	Instruction
R	Read a music file (LOAD)
S	Score a music file (COMPILE)
P	Play a scored music file
G	Read, Score and then Play a music file
D	Directory
K	Kill a Music File
Q	Quit Program

• Larry Alexander - Email: lonestar1@cox-internet.com
  Web Site: https://www.alexandermusic.com
• Jon Bokelman (ORCH-80/85/90) - Email: jb@jmlpartners.com
• Jerry Bradshaw - Email: bradshaw@fuse.net
• John Renfro Davis - Email: jrdavis@lcc.net
• Bryan Eggers (ORCH-80/85/90) - Email: vegasnews@cox.net
• Robert A. Fowkes - Email: rfowkes@worldnet.att.net
• Charles Grisamore - Email: grisamore@mindspring.com

Official Zap 1 for Orchestra-85 SCE 21-Apr-82

Official Zap 2 For PIANO-85/90 15-Aug-82

Official Zap 3 for PIANO-85 30-Sep-82

Piano-85 Chain ZAP by Jimmy Lyon 70135,161

This article relates only to the Model I versions of either of these wonderful music programs. I have no information on the Model 3/4 versions, although the patches should be just as easy.

If you have a large number of ORCH or PIANO music files, you might like a way to more completely automate the playing of them. The (G)et command only plays a few pieces before you have to attend to it again. I wanted to be able to call for any number of songs, preferably with their titles stored in an text file on disk.

Since most TRS-80 DOSs now have some kind of "DO" capability, which will feed simulated keystrokes from a text file into an application program, it seemed most straightforward to make use of this. Unfortunately, the ORCH and PIANO programs do not take their keyboard input via the standard system device drivers. Instead, they call their own keyboard driver, and they won't listen to a DO file input. To correct this the music programs must be made to call the DOS keyboard driver instead of their own. This technique works cleanly insofar as it has to, for reading and playing music files, but does not allow editing or composing etc. So don't try to use the modified ORCH or PIANO programs for this. Use them only for playing music files under the control of the DOS.

The keyboard driver call is easily altered, as described below, by changing only two bytes in either of the programs (at 5EE1 for ORCH-85 or at 6268 for PIANO-85). This change alone will let you use text file inputs as commands. Thus you could have a DO file such as this (where ORCH4GET/CMD is the modified ORCH-85/CMD program):

and it would play all of the indicated songs. I was pretty happy with this, but also wanted to be able to call for some silences between the selections, to keep disk drive noises from interfering with the music. The best solution would have been to locate the code that reads and plays a file under the (G)et command, and patch in time delays there. I was unable to do this, so I considered just calling for some dummy or redundant (S)core operations for each song in my command file. This works fine but leads to very long command files, since you can only put one command on a line.

To tighten these up, I needed to make the ORCH or PIANO program recognize a substitute character for the Carriage Return (byte 0D). I enlarged upon the keyboard patch I already had, adding a filter action that would watch for ";" (byte 3B) and change it to 0D. This requires nine additional bytes of code, and the safest place I could put them is over the initial logo text. The remaining text can be modified to