In article <da**********@n wrdmz03.dmz.ncs .ea.ibs-infra.bt.com>,
Malcolm <re*******@btin ternet.com> wrote:
The long answer is no. Music inherently demands parallel processing and
accurate timing so that the soundtrack is not interrupted by the other tasks
the computer is doing.
Say wot?
You've made a poor assumption, that the computer -has- other things
to do. That wasn't the case on the PDP-11 I studied "computer music" on.
And even if there were other things to do, sound boards have had queues
for over a decade: you toss some samples in, go and service your other
task, come back and put more samples in.
C doesn't make any real-time guarantees, but if you have output
queues you can probably fudge it *well enough* for most purposes.
[People tend not to expect 32 note polyphony in 128 voice harmony while
defragmenting the disk at the same time as they are doing a full
virus scan.]
More of a problem, perhaps, is that C provides no mechanism for
writing to fixed hardware addresses. (Conversion between integral
types and pointers is implementation defined, and in practice usually
only gives access to process virtual memory unless one is working at
the kernel or device driver level.)
--
Oh, to be a Blobel!
