The Rainbow Vol. 09 No. 01 - August 1989 - TRS-80 Color ...

I Feature
Put another nickel in
The Nickelodeon
84 THE RAINBOW August 1989
By William G. Budenholzer
5 in g along? That's what they wanted
to do. So, after typing a few hundred
OAT A statements, the CoCo was playing
some fam iliar tunes. A touch of CoCo's
colorful low-resolution graphics offered
some visual interest, but it needed more, a
lot more.
[twas difficult to manually compil e the
long li sts of numbers needed for the SOUND
command. It also needed word s. I tried
sav ing notes on tape and the word s were put
on screen to coincide with the notes, but it
wasn't user-friendly. Extended Color
BAS IC's PLAY command was the inspiration
for a song editor.
The graphics develop into a piano resembling
an old upright, with space for the
words, as in a player piano. A one-line
routine centers the words in this space. The
editor has two modes of operation, the first
mode allows direct entry of the words and
notes using Extended BASIC's PL AY elements.
The second mode al lows you to use
the computer's keyboard as a one octave
musical keyboard. Both modes support
vari ous editor functions such as Insert and
Delete.
Overture
To more easil y explain how to use the
editor, first key in the program, then save
and run it. When the mai n menu appears,
press BREAK and type N=30 : GOT0600 . Then
press ENTER. This should return you to the
main menu.