For many folks, an 8-bit microcomputer method some of the house computer systems which set such a lot of folks on our long ago within the Eighties. However this ignores a whole era of Seventies 8-bit machines which stuffed the marketplace for inexpensive place of job and business desktop computing ahead of we had been seduced by way of %-Guy or Frogger. It’s this sort of, an SWTPC 6809, that’s discovered its manner into the arms of [Look Mum No Computer], and in direct contradiction to his branding, he’s used it to keep watch over a synthesizer.
As you’d be expecting from the title, the pc hides a 6809 processor, and is derived from the top of the Seventies when that chip have been launched so that you could stave off the marketplace risk from the likes of Zilog and MOS Applied sciences. It has an SS-50 bus motherboard, and the saga within the video underneath the smash is as a lot in regards to the manufacturing of a customized DAC and cause port for it to force the synth as it’s about troubleshooting a four-decade-old laptop. It’s a credit score to SWTPC that the device is in large part operating in any case this time, alternatively it succumbs to a couple harm right through the improvement of the interface.
On the finish although, there’s an absolutely useful sequencer on a Seventies laptop, enjoying some beautiful excellent digital song from an analogue synth. That is EXACTLY the long run we had been promised, again in 1979!
Lengthy-time readers will know this isn’t the primary SWTPC that has graced those pages.