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With compile times taking many minutes back in 1986 on my Commodore Amiga workstation, I wrote a tool that "beeps" at me! But because the Amiga can play samples, it's an "orchestra hit!"

#retrocomputing

This video shows how well made the operating system routines were for the sound, making it easy to asynchronously deal with sound coming from many different tasks, handling tough problems like voice allocation and precedence as part and parcel.

This video is dedicated to RJ Mical, Sam Dicker, Robert Pariseau, Dale Luck, Carl Sassenrath, and the rest of the Amiga team, who made such a thoughtful software counterpart to the powerful hardware. Thank you.

Code is here:
https://github.com/tschak909/amiga-orch-beep

Index:
00:00 Intro/Demo
01:40 About the sound
05:00 ATOM and why it's needed to put the sound in chip RAM
06:35 Combing through the code
07:30 Chapter 5 of RKM Libraries/Devices
24:30 What happens if you don't use ATOM.
25:00 Using Orch as intended