[SiriusHardware]

I had another little go with this and decided to convert Silvester's 'player' source to SBASM3 format so I could fiddle with it and went around in circles for quite a while because I had completely forgotten that when you load a pointer with the address of a subroutine with the intention of then doing (e.g) XPPC 3 to execute the routine, you have to load the pointer with the start address of the subroutine minus one.

I wasn't doing that at first so the MIDI out subroutine was being called at its start address +1, which didn't work too well. With hindsight this also explains why I had trouble getting Silvester's MIDI-out subroutine working in a small test program of my own.

However, it's now working. The MK14 finally made it into the hands of users in 1978 but was very likely a work-in-progress the year before. The original MK14 'Music Box' program was probably written in the Queen's Silver Jubilee year 1977 and beeped out 'God Save The Queen'. I have transferred the same tune data into Silvester's MIDI player and had it playing over majestic, heavily layered strings at a suitably sombre pace.

Think of it as an MK14 with a £700+ sound chip (Well, that's what the synth cost in 1990).

This was something I had meant to do earlier in the year because this year was the Queens's Platinum Jubilee so it would have been a nice way of bookending the events, perhaps putting together a video showing first my original MK14 playing the beepy version and then my issue VI playing the same thing on the synth, but it turned out to be a more poignant year than I ever knew it would be.

Now, I think I'll try to find something a little bit more upbeat for it to play.