Free Software for Linux*

and other systems

Musical MIDI Accompaniment

Reverse Metronome

GUI MIDI Player

Vmusic CD Database

MUP Notation

HTML preprocessor

Color Computer

Discontinued Stuff

I really like Linux. It is a wonderful environment for doing what I like—writing fun utility programs. Here's what's available from me just now (there will be more later, so keep checking).... This page links to all my available software.

Music Related Software

MMA - Musical MIDI Accompaniment Our soon-to-be famous program which creates midi tracks for a soloist to perform over from a user supplied file containing chords and MMA directives.

CountBeats A handy little program to help figure out the BPM for a piece. Sort of a "Reverse Metronome".

XPmidi A graphical frontend to the aplaymidi or pmidi program.

Vmusic CD Database A handy graphical (Tkinter) program to catalog CDs.

MUP I use the musical notation program MUP. Here is a review, some links and a number of useful utilities.

Web Development

htmlexp A macro expander or html pre-processor I use to maintain these web pages.

Tandy Color Computer and Microware OS-9

COCO to Linux Suite

If you ever owned a Tandy Color Computer and have a lot of old disks sitting around, this suite of utilities will help you transfer them over to your Linux box.

You will need a fairly current version of Linux (I wrote the stuff under 2.0.0, but older versions should work) and a compatible disk drive. My 1.44 meg drive works okay. The software contains the source, makefiles and docs. Also included are programs to convert Telewriter64 binary text files and Color Computer BASIC Program binary files to ASCII. Included in the package is a bunch of messages the author of the disk drivers (Alain Knaff) and I exchanged...well worth reading for the insights into floppy disk paramater setting under Linux.

Download (17K): coco_linux.tar.gz

OS-9 Disk

Here's a program suite to read floppy disks created by the OS-9 operating system. This OS is from Microware Systems and was popular on the Tandy Color Computer, many industrial systems, etc. The programs should read most OS-9 and OS-9000 disks. This is a early BETA. Feedback appreciated! The 13K tar.gz file contains the source, binaries and a short readme file.

Download (16K): os9disk.tar.gz

Discontinued Items

Ved Text Editor

This editor is a product which has evolved over a long period. It was first written for the Tandy Color Computer, modified and enhanced for OS9/68000, modified more and ported to Linux.

Sadly I no longer use Ved. I'm become way too busy to maintain this program and use Emacs for my own use. Here are the sources. Let me know if they are helpful.

Vprint text formatter

This is the full distribution of Vprint, a text formatter similar to troff-like formatters. This is a commercial quality program—we have sold hundreds of copies of the 6809/68000 versions. It is NOT FREEWARE! You can however download a copy of the program and receive a free licence to use it on your system.

Vprint was originally written in 6809 Assembly Language on a Tandy Color Computer with 512K of RAM under the OS9 operating system. At the time it was written there was nothing else available on that platform which supported proportional printing. With the aid and chiding of some friends Vprint grew in size and got more and more powerful.In 1991 it was ported to OS9/68000 (a RTOS running mostly on 68xxx processors).

Again, I stopped using and maintaining this many years ago. A copy is available if you email me and say nice things.

Penguin * LINUX is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds

Web Design--Bob van der Poel
This page "index.html" was last modified on Sun Aug 29 16:47:00 2010