Xref: utzoo comp.sys.atari.st:11828 rec.music.synth:4819 Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!purdue!decwrl!ucbvax!agate!saturn!ssyx!koreth From: koreth@ssyx.ucsc.edu (Steven Grimm) Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st,rec.music.synth Subject: Re: MIDI Networking Message-ID: <5080@saturn.ucsc.edu> Date: 11 Oct 88 21:02:50 GMT References: <3602@druhi.ATT.COM> <6424@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> <594@hudson.acc.virginia.edu> <3277@pt.cs.cmu.edu> Sender: usenet@saturn.ucsc.edu Reply-To: koreth@ssyx.ucsc.edu (Steven Grimm) Organization: The Mad Scientists' Guild Lines: 28 I had the opportunity to take a look at John DeMar's "ST-NET" in a very primitive form. It was *SLOW*. File service is slower than floppy access by a significant amount. And that's with only two computers talking to each other; things will slow down even more when you add more computers to the net. The problem isn't anything you can really solve in software; it's the 31Kbaud transmission rate of the MIDI port. That's simply too slow for anything but the most primitive networking applications (MidiMaze, for example). Even Appletalk, which isn't a speed demon by any stretch of the imagination, runs seven times faster than the MIDI port. Combine that with the cockeyed way the ST handles MIDI interrupts (they have lower priority than things like the RS232 port, which is silly since the MIDI port is half again as fast) and you have a really monstrous programming project that's not going to give you a whole lot of benefit anyway. The DMA port is the only good place to plug a network interface into the ST; it is fast enough to do reasonable networking, such as Ethernet. If someone develops an Appletalk box for the ST, they will stand to make quite a tidy profit, especially if they can make it work with the Spectre 128 and Magic Sac. That or an Ethernet interface are much more worthwhile networking projects for the ST. (Of course, if you're just doing MIDI networking for the fun of programming the stuff, ignore everything I've just said...) --- These are my opinions, and in no way reflect those of UCSC, which are wrong. Steven Grimm Moderator, comp.{sources,binaries}.atari.st koreth@ssyx.ucsc.edu uunet!ucbvax!ucscc!ssyx!koreth