Theo Verelst Diary Page

Sat Mar 31 20:31:35 2001

I've decided after good example to write some diary pages with toughts and events.

Oh, in case anybody fails to understand, I'd like to remind them that these pages are copyrighted, and that everything found here may not be redistributed in any other way then over this direct link without my prior consent. That includes family, christianity, and other cheats. The simple reason is that it may well be that some people have been ill informed because they've spread illegal 'copies' of my materials even with modifications. Apart from my moral judgement, that is illegal, and will be treated as such by me. Make as many references to these pages as you like, make hardcopies, but only of the whole page, including the html-references, and without changing a iota or tittel...

And if not? I won't hesitate to use legal means to correct wrong that may be done otherwise. And I am serious. I usually am. I'm not sure I could get 'attempt to grave emotional assault' out of it, but infrigement on copyright rules is serious enough. And Jesus called upon us to respect the authorities of state, so christians would of course never do such a thing. Lying, imagine that.
 

Previous Diary Entries
 

Sat Mar 31 20:31:22 2001

I feel compelled to write about some essential subjects of weight, I guess both practically and theoretically, formally and in life, Maybe because I'm not in a position of real, tangible, formal power much, though I gues knowledge is power, too, and positive pr helps, and the influence of writing and speaking can be considerable. Maybe I'm compensating in certain ways, maybe feeling better performing or just doing what I can, my civillian duty, possibly my quote christian unquote one.

Christian Presidents, Separation d'etat et religion?

I think it was the french 'sun' king Lod. XVI who said he would only be answering to God, and noone else, sort of claiming a double high position that way. An english church I visit at times, starting mainly with a singing evening because I knew some people that went there and asked me along, has an emblem with the known enough saying 'honi soit qui mal I pense', which in connection with the former is probably too strong, but there is a point.

I read a book, or at least portions of it about the process of segregation of state and religion, when interested in various subjects after I realized very, very much more must be true of the things I didn't experience directly in person that I did know about, and hoped would be true only in some remote alleys of society, where wrape and torture by family, satanist or other -ist sacrifices, far reaching treachurousness such as various fake christian ones connected with, nazism with very evil implications in hidden life too, and other absolute lows are steeped to, performed, hidden, and part of victims and purpetrators lifes so much that normalness is pretty much out.

I realized that my own familily experience, see some of my pages, can hardly be explained without such evils, and probably others and derivations, being so much part of life forms I'd been near an in such high and many places, and that therefore I'd need at least an appropriate enough angle.

That first being getting the hell away from some people I'd worked with and professionally trusted that may be or have been in abusing modes with persons that I knew and had know, some of which were girlfriends, and who I tried to understand a lot better for their behaviour. No question that I would aim to want to be even near non-persons that might well be their abusers in various incredible ways.

I had not thought about such scale thinking about illuminaty, devil and deamon worshippers including the rome ones, incest, wrape intimidation, and 'sin' in various ways. I knew about the existence, and that certain cults were realy very bad, as well as some criminals, and that hitchcock and jeckil and hide were not for nothing, but not that such a vast amount of for me realy quite unimaginable misery and evil was so much part of my surroundings even, and since not many, some though, informed me in person, and since I've not been witness of other, quite bad though, than lets say social misbehaviour, it is hard to have conclusive evidence for things that I am sure of are still there to wrape, murder, abuse, oppress, threaten and blackmail into silence.

Thinking about those subjects having for very uncanny reasons and absolutely against any decency or reasonability, even when I can proof it against the law been kicked out of the university I worked, I of course also wondered about what to use against such evil, what the whole picture would be like in this time and around me and some that I wanted, and lets say what I could learn from sources that could be of some use, informationwise, at least. So I went to some libraries, and spent hours of reading into various subjects, finding at least more than enough to think about and to make clear my sanity had all but left me, as some at some point tried to make legaly stick, and failed, but in fact that a lot of faked or real insane behaviour has obvious and very evil roots, and that my starting points in life and normal enough thinking modes, also about such subjects as the makeup and models in society, government and religion were more than adequate, to the point and well founded, and that it made at least sense to figure out some of the great fundamental sources of evil.

Including the supernatural and / or religion is not necessary in this picture, but one cannot exclude the effect of religeous parties and their walks in life from fundamental pictures about what happens on the world stage at various levels, and since I did have the conviction that it my own christian faith, not to be mingled up with anyone elses' views without my permission, did at least make sense in some fundamental ways, and that too much in what goes on is not coincidental or noisy enough not to have some source or sources beyond what directly meets the eye. Including prayer, and lets say pigeons finding the homes back when the homes are moved, and deamons, and hopefully the existance of a God the Father I knew enough about to be not blank on the subject, a human being being God having come to earth called Jesus, and the Holy Spirit and his leading and gifts of revelation, healing and comfort.

Being a well, lets say quite absolute top edified technician and scientist, of course in the beta area, I want to think straight about every subject of real relevance that allows it, and every subject should after ample trying and model making and ackuiring knowledge allow it, unless it is an unknowable mistery, which is unacceptable starting point for anything relevant in life, unless it is utterly proven so.

Luckily, thus far I'm not forced to assume there are many great unsearchable fundamental misteries about the whole of things as man can perceive them, except a few, lets say about Gods' will and deeper thoughts, the exact position and momentum of every particle in the universe and heisenberg, and maybe why a transistor noises exactly as it does, and why exactly prayer works, and some of these are at least quite searchable, except not very know at this point in time.

I'm sure the nazis or other formal-is and generally life sucking ones are interested in knowing every little detail of life such as to play little god themselves, but such need I don't think I have, and I don't think I've to engage in throwing dice or such games to get enough unpredictablity to make life interesting or fun.

Thinking about politics, or in general positions of leadership, I wondered what the modes of operation were, and at this time I'm quite convinced that even though that seemed rather dramatic to me at times, the book of revelation is probably a reliable and one of the not so many uncandid sources of information about also that subjects, and that the multiheaded beasts, babylonic religions including their worship of evil in various forms, mysteries and craving for taking of life in utterly evil rites and rituals, and the idea of many antichristal and delusive spirits and persons having a power and wannabe built in anomality that makes them sucker for such and live in ways that some may take or be forced to take as fake forms of salvation are all in the big and small picture of the things than underlie the various modes of operation in a sinfull world.

Meaning that wanting to know why not simply the best leaders can rule and fight crime and make a better or good enough world, preventing the whole thing to go straight to doom leads to finding without question that also democracy is built in many ways on the ways of the devil who introduced sin into this world. On purpose that figure, because biblically, natural man is by nature son or daughter of the devil, the gospel being there of course, wanting to do the will of that father, and that figure has an illogical and adverse desire to go against God, rebel against Him, and try to take over his creation, take is life and glory, and preferably convince earthlings it itself is sort of god, claiming, though not having, the same authority and power.

These are for me not merely assumptions, I assume that they are true, though I like some care to be taken before junping to all kinds of conclusions, but I am quite aware that in positions of gouvernment it is quite wise to seperate affairs of state and religeous affairs as long and probably as far as possible, unless their good and objective and publicly well defined reason not to. Most issues, ranging from street lights to chambers of commerce are quite well dealt with outside the religeous, and should be such, without much question. The fighting of slave owners may be done on the basis of religeously founded convictions, but that probably happens on both sides, and politics is most probably not the right place to resolve religeous arguments, except maybe by voting. The horrors of a moslim gouvernment, just like the very bad fruits of a roman catholic one though not need much elaboration, I think.

It is not too hard to reconcile such point of view with having a personal religion, which of course to make any sense as public or leading person would have to be clear enough, though many may be deluded into thinking that is not so, which in my opinion is great error. When such religeon becomes part of the system of state, either it can be as a personal, pretty much hidden motivation, or as a directly stated part of lets say a party program or political aims, lets say a protestant party claiming their Christ is important to be told about in primary schools, probably giving some information about other religions, but not wanting their message of good news messed up by everything that comes along that isn't good news (of course in their opinion) at all.

Now what about ruling the sinners, and probably more to the point wanting a government free from child abusing nobodies and lets say anything from illuminati through the jesuits (strong historic material exists in libraries about such catholic abusive saywers), over general adherers to demonic doctrines, secret or even open world dominion plots and person trade loteries and general or specific traitors, schemers and others unworthy of being paid for by the taxes of also good willing people.

Ruling of sinners assumes that power is needed and used to keep people with evil inclinations limited in their evil, destrucitveness and own power, or similar such reasoning. Tricky subject as it is, I guess mainly the hope would be that if (when) indeed Christ would return and 'rule with a rod of iron' things in that direction may be expected to work. The idea of having authority of state or some official body for such purposes has proven at least to be quite tempting and a bad idea in historic sense, a state that can do what it does because it claims to have 'god on its side' is a dangerous vehicle of power.

Without question, certain evil must be fought and preferably dimished or abolished by some form of gouvernment, which is in most interpretations also biblical. Because that inevitably lead to complications, parallel but not similar to the problem of fighting an evil with majorities adhering to it in democracy, at least we are left with a few proven enough ways to deal with life in a state system officially, such a law, army, police, evidently for westerners democracy, open gouvernment, public pairlement, double checking civil institutions, gouvernment controlled army, and a police that does not stand above the law.

Now what if the nazu plan to take over the whole country, and no one has cared for wanting leaders that are at least acceptable enough to shake hands with, instead of wishing dead on the spot for their desires to wrape torture, abuse children, apply witchcraft and sorcery and put deamons. their doctrines and evil religeously led nobodies over peoples heads? Damnation, misery and increase of practical hell, I think. Joining with the Italian fascists, maybe late but effective disagreement of the russians, running over of the inspicable dutch, resistance of the brittish and unluckily occupied french, joining of the japs maybe and challenging of the americans, I guess.

What a misery, and what an evil and generally stupid intellectual and doctrinewise state must underlie such. And what luck that officially, statewise such did not at all democratically happen. Officially, or openly. And that it has been stopped and made void when it did. And that there were some that may not have been blessed exceedingly with impaccible or unforgiven man of state, but that at least found the sanity and the effectiveness and the heart to fight such evil effectively, not by bureaucracy and cunning lies, but with lives at stakes, tangible and for real.

What a waste of historic knowledge it would be to ackowledge and realy listen to another drawfy antichrist playing the nice little underdog great father all in one, and to think that listening to the most retarded human scheming thoughts this world will probably ever know, and live in expectation of something that with crawl up from under the circles of entities bearing the name of people that cannot even deal with children without abusing them, and think that such a form of growth is even higher than the actually divine that might be revealed with some of simple enough or honest makeup.

And what a doctine of damnation, after the words of the apostle ('former disciple') Peter to think that it is better to accept and live in evil, so something good may come of it. That some kind of heridital sin will be resolved miraculously by implementing more and more evil and lies, so that in the end things are realy worth while. If you feel at home in hell.

Anti nonsense fun

I'm sure one day my software will make the world not worse of. As a (formal) logic statement, its a safe one to consider true, because it is quite probably I'll make some more software, and that it does not make the world not worse of, why would it, it is nice enough well made enough, teaches not such violent things as scoring points by racing old ladies of the pavement, though I'm quite sure little nazis are well prepared by devious old farts, of which some without question would have deserved to have died much ealier in life in normal human law or thinking.

My software today was about honorable, peacable, and generally inspickable things as running little scripts to show the time in a drawing. Followed by updating such time readout regularly and automatically, and adding a page of html (web) text and images in a text window with the clock still running.

That may not seem so much to the point, but we'll kearn something about computer today that would work fine in course as an example for a quite relevant subject multitasking and real time events on a PC, albeit an old one, which makes it easier to make this point clear, because its so much easier to swamp its few megabytes of memory with programs and data, and make the disc rattle all the time to keep up with the few things that ask for more storage space than available in the ram memory banks.

In short, I was playing around with the concept of timing automatically some events on the bwise canvas, like having a block which emits a signal with say a seconds counter value every few seconds, having first made a big clock with the 'after' command. that commands can execute any other command after first waiting a specified time, for instance 1500 milliseconds. Than after a second and a half, for instance some block may be fired, which again after some period of time fires another, and yet another, etc. Thats the basis for the 'run' and 'propagate' commands I've made, which can in sensible way make blocks active and transfer data between them in bwise.

Strictly speaking, there is no time delay needed to do so, but firing a block may take so little time that the visial feedback offered on the bwise canvas may be hard to follow, so for the sake of tracing, pacing the activities with some convenient delay in between changes may be desirable. Making blocks that have such delays in them, or that can act as periodic activity generators for repeating signals obviously can serve many purposes, and when such a block is followed by a time reader and formatter, again followed by a text or other display block, we can end up with an understandable bwise structure for implementing a clock.

The clock was running, and I optimistically tried to add a text widget to the bwise application by reading a library for rendering web pages, and trying a diary page with some pictures in it. It worked, which is fine and interesting enough, sort of like a integrated webpage (not web, since clearly I don't have that on the machine) browser, fun and usefull for manuals for instance.

Now the instructional part happened, when I read in a bigger page, the clock kept running, and the ugly but viewable pictures showed up, but the memory was exhausted, so the swapping to disc had to help, and every few seconds, a piece of memory was exchanged with the disc swap file, making the whole application very slow, like having to wait 10 seconds or so before types characters would appear on the console.

Suppose that every second, a command would be generated to update the clock on the bwise window, than if the update would take longer than a second, they'd probably be stored up for later processing, leading to a list that would grow longer and longer with the progression of time. Luckily in this case all that happened is that updates become less frequent, since the update would be timed a few seconds apart, simply reading the (correct) time from the computer clock every time, and the 'after' command for the next update would jsut be executed later than requested.

Essential UI programming skills required? Not realy for just this, but these are completely the issues at stake in programs with real time like controls, which especially when they are not trivial aften fall short and for instance make a busy system unstable, of fail to perform at some point.

Now what if two 'run' commands are started, which automatically start a chain of blocks being run, each one their own, that means activities are going on in the network which are not so easy to predict, depending on how accurate the timing between the steps of the run commands sequence parts are. Such communicating agents in a network fired in a certain order, interlaced with another set if linked activities possibly interacting with the same agents can generate lots of possible what are called execution traces, which can be understood and designed with, but for which formal methods are not commongood, and it pais to look at such subject both from theoretical and practical application point of view when dealing with systems with parallel and communicating behaviour.

I might do a seperate page on it, it is scientificly speaking fancy and advanced enough a subject, and certainly deserves to be a bit more fashionable in broader circles.

Mon April 2, 9:00 2001

Truth is valuable. In general, I guess, though I can imagine making and maintaining lies can be profitable and valuable for certain parties too. In general, at some point truth is inevitable: if I don't eat and drink, I die. When I die, what happens, and what is realy actually true about it? And even when we would want lies somehow, it is usually not white noise (meaning complete randomness) that underlies such desire, implying there is a reason for such desire which can be described in truth. And in blackmail schemes, that automatically means that the truth itself, measured over the whole of the problem, is them most valuable of all, inevitably. Maybe apart for power.

Relations

At some point as a student I knew there were various parties that sort of made a point that networking is it to perform and advance in the world, and I wasn't unaware of the idea that I liked enough to be in with various people from quite varied backgrounds for various contentwise and like reasons.

Sort of like having to know lots of people to invite my band at their parties? Not realy, in fact, I guess I'd have seen it more in the interest area, though I did do that a few times.

Girlfriends, I'm certain would be a reason too, to see and meet, and see what would happen.

Not so much jobs, I would have those, most of the time, that wasn't so much a target, though I did have political lets say interests, but I don't think I'd have wanted to exchange my ambition and money wise well sounding and working microelectronics and computer background and working environments for something so relatively elusive and low paying ideals as being political professional. Interestwise I think I would have an interest to find out what that was mainly about, and for instance what could be done about certain in my opinion important subjects such as the general suckingness that I observed almost all over dutch, and probably many foreign political 'activities' (suppressed gmpf), and the in rome's club and my opinion pressing and urgent matter of somehow making the more or less proeduction and industry oriented economuc machinery into a bit more lastingly oriented environment possible or friendly variation.

That would be worth some effort, and I guess I'd still find that, though other factors are in the picture.

Social activities normally in my thinking would not necessarily be linked with thinking about either of the above much, in private or freetime sense. I think normal and maybe some excentric activities would be based on feeling like something and being with certain people, friends, acquantances, fellow interessees for something, or mere coincidental contacts.

I realise that there are various factors making such 'normal' life not so average, and in fact probably quite hard, which is difficult to reconcile with natural and relaxed relations.

When I meet a woman I like, and most I need to do is think about how to get the hell away from watchdogs and family ties that want to keep, guard, control, abuse, or worse their sort of though to be property, even though they should normally speaking be able to be free as bird, relations are not easy or normal from the start.

And when circles and possibly histories are behind that that lie in the area of absolute horror movies but then in real life and with real horror events, it is not easy to do justice to people, and to make something work in surroundings that do often not just not seem to care about such, but have no shame or even fake civilisation to hide that they want to abuse such even further.

I'm certain in the past jeleousy too has been a motivation for such, which is of different nature, and when misplaced clearly a sign of at the very least unmaturity, but plain evil must be in that picture, too, which if anything should not be made effective at least for where I want to be reasonably well.

I made the remark about women, because I do think that important, I'm sure because I fund women important, and also because I'm not satisfied in terms of having one or more near enough as I would like, though I'm quite aware of the fact that such may be not barely necessary to life, in other words that there are more things to life. I do find it important though that I even need to be sort of before the response defensive on the subject, even in general enough writing. I don't think some would still realy try to proclaim me nuts for trying to have something realy to say, also on such subject, but I find there is so much either non-sense or plain evil in these areas in many lives, that it may take quite some more than even averagely normalness and over average intelligent thinking to tackle associated problems or questions with some chance of success.

I'm sure there are many that don't deserve such success, that deserve to be put down, maybe damned in certain ways, maybe kept away from what is natural, because they didn't and or wouldn't deal with normal relations even near good enough to actually let them mess people up with it, and I'm sure that what some tried to make me look like, which I'm sure is almost completely unjustified and ridiculous, and certainly is intentionwise evil only from in their case, which as in normal and famous enough classical and modern utterances in literary, artwise and normal life is nothing much more than treasurousness, evil intent, scheming, and other things that are not even interesting to look at in soaps, when there is nothing there that does make it worth while, let alone in anything any normal person can even take serious.

So in practive seperation from such persons and systems to some degree is inevitable to make certain things at least potentionally work right, that is logical. Unless one has a probably very interesting religeous conviction, based on a doubtlessly incredible little or big voice that makes clear that everything wasn't sacrificed in fascism good enough yet, so that the nazis got too much of a shot at destroying the realy working operation modes of it, and that such sacrifices of what is good or at least acceptable and of course the at least mocking up anything even starting to think about getting there is realy worth it, and should at every cost always be tried, because a system that is made worse or with worse components is always, follow the leader here, say after me now: better. Is it, that we all know. The horrible bad ones always get complete power in the end anyway, so why not help them before that time. And if they don't we'll help them because that is better. For some completely mysterious but evidently present and very incredible and basically know reason noone but everybody understands yet. And then the world will be wonderfull, of course, all that evil and badness together, everyone understands, that of course realy works, what a question, you are not Wise One yet, evidently, what a laugh.

And those that are not the worst of must learn to abuse and gain very unjust power over lesser ones, of course, nature teaches us that itself.

Getting cynical again? I've seen too many lets say circuits at work around me to not make such paradoxially ridiculous statements, some should know better, at least.

In pratice, I'm sure just like I knew before there is only one God that is about the whole of things, and that that God made only one way to himself, which is by being convinced of truth and that not becoming lyarish or evil is needed to stay with what is worth while, and that with the state of evil as it is, at some points it is completely inevitably essential that He provides solutions.

I don't say I don't like it that He is also making nothing much 'by nature' worth while or good enough to realy live with, but it would be good that there are some forms of at least acceptable christianity in the true and good sense at work to have at least certain parts of life in some acceptable enough mode to not continuously be aware and countering the worst kinds of evil that evil man can come up with, and to see some fruits at least worth looking at and maybe of some interest or like every now and then and here and there. I'm sure that is not impossible, but generally speaking I often get the idea the country and probably world I'm in is even quite utterly deplorable in too many ways.

I can imagine going to a music or electronic messe for instance, and have more than fun enough, or, provided I have the normal enough means, go to various supermarkets and friendly buy some good enough and nice enough food, so I guess utter damnation isn't in all that is, which is luckily.

Relationwise, I consider it such that many people have circuits they think in, and that for many years, probably as usual, there not too much coming from those.

I think have some pages now to put on (I don't alway write the subchapters chronologically), so I'll continue this line of thinking later. I got a nice mail about someone finding my pages interesting, which at least is a pleasant though when making them. And that the page counter also gets hits (I probably) in foreign destinations I might well like to be.

Why is a Z80 still interesting?

I've regularly been reading in the Synclavier manuals, I'll see if I can dig up a image of the instrument to give and idea. Though I never myself played the instrument, I played quite some also famous synths, but none of the synclavier, ppg, or fairlight major appliances, mainly because they aren't/weren't so readily available, read expensive. It is usually nice to read a professional piece of equipments' manual, as an example I might quote the Rev-7 Yamaha digital reverberation unit's manual, If I find a way to cut-and-paste some of the pdf version I think I can still find. The synclavier (from digital england) is from about 20-15 years ago, and of course in some computer senses little short of ridiculous, but the ideas and the way the whole machine is made to work, and the software and operation possibities fit in a university setting to learn quite a bit. Maybe like the PDP-7 or so (I don't remember the number exactly) practicum I did to work with one of the first computers that were decently enough, ee-wise understandable, modular systems that were developed into multi tasking and multi user systems, that for instance was used to in practice make and test microprograms. Not that I in the end cared much, because there was nothing much to gain over the standard instructions set, it didn't make much sense, but the idea of having boards full of TTL chips that have known and overseeable functions, that anyone can (still) buy in every electronics store that make a system that then in high level of detail can be told how to operate is appealing in various ways.

Not that many would want to program a pentium even at machine code level, which is quite complicated, depending on the tools and the target program, let alone at even lower level, but at least it can be worth putting the available computation resources to work effectively for a certain problem not having to think and work through the preset methods of some high level tool.

The synclavier software and hardware, in fact coincidently just like some of my software, running from 286 onward (though it does also work on the 86), does fourier synthesis and also sampling as a basic sound generating idea, and provides all kinds of processing on the basis of this. The ideas can be described in general terms enough, such as 'extract the spectrum from a sound, mess with it a bit, and make another sound like it', which can be fun enough, but going down to every detail, and going up to the right theoretical foundations, and in the end getting a practically applicable and musical instrument from all this is another story, and an interesting one. When my wave laboratory page sais tremolo can be amplitude modulation and vibrato frequency modulation, and makes formulawise clear what that does, and can even present an image of a graph what the idea is, you still don't know what all the parameters should be and how to apply the principles exactly necessarily to in practive make music with it. A mathematical formulation, and examples that make actual sounds, and preferably some kind of musical example that makes such a sound work at least defines well what I'm talking about, and then things are close to real applicability, and allow comprehensive knowledge acquisition.

It's in a mainly language oriented library, which is interesting in itself, considering there are a few quite heavy electronics and digital circuit and synthesizer books there, which at a superficial would seem quite out of place between the latin, greek, modern languages and fundamental and country wise historic materials. 'What are you doing LaPlace tranforms for in a place like that?" Not that there is something against it. They just happened to have some books on it, and I can't currently get to a more logical place, though I went there before for other reasons, another athmosphere, I guess.

Atmosphere still another contrast is a Z80 computer system, and there are various synth resources mentioning such a system, which is fun to have a glance at, though I don't need that much in that direction now. The idea of a synthesizer with electronics and a microprocessor to form a synthesizer machine is interesting though when all issues at stake receive some attention. Then everything from generating waveforms over filtering nd modulation to making actual musically usefull sounds can be covered in the end, which is quite a comprehensive subject.

So what is the interest of the Z80 microcomputer sys I have lying around, regularly ticking and playing musical lines from a small keyboard? The answer lies in the latter: it can be played and produces musical notes, and therefore in itself has value, if I don't have another kayboard or synth, and probably some more, since it can be programmed to do most things, except be a faster computer system, of course. Its top speed make it almost ridiculous compared with modern dsp's that can be used as the heart and lungs of contemporary synths, though in the sense of a lets say microcontroller system, often used for tasks like controlling devices or electronics and reading keyboards, managing displays, etc, it is more than average.

Since I have tcl running, I've also put the Z80 assembler/linker (and even C compiler) on that system, and have tested running them from a bwise environment, which works pretty well. That means I can now take Z80 machine language programs for instance, and make bwise blocks of them, and even automatically download them into the Z80 sys, which is not bad at all as development environment, for microcontrollers like the still popular 80(C)51, which is a less powerfull and slower variation of the Z80, such could even be commercially interesting, when properly dressed up, the freedom of using tcl scripts and the simulation and network capability of bwise has quite some added value. Not that I'm into it too much, but then again, a moder microcontroller running at high enough speeds is just one little block with pins that can be given a program and then can use its pins for what one wants is not a bad concept, everything from alarm systems to display controllers can be made with them, and if not too much memory or a fast computer infrastructure (such as can be available on my microcomputer sys) are needed, they are handy little devices.

I last week read TI now is planning on producing a DSP (sort of like the ones I mentioned before, but low power consumption type, for instance for battery based devices) with a built in (I think strong) ARM processor, which is the kind that sits inside popular PDA's. As if they sort of read my mind. It would be nice to have a sample of that, with a small enough 486 devkit, AND a little PCB adapter that lets me connect the thing up without becoming soldering watchmaker, but that is a bit like asking could you get me recent super injection brand super X car engine with a clutch connection mechanism and bolt pitch that fits on my '83 renault 5. Though in electronics one can get away with such things in various ways, which is fun.

The conclusion to the titles question is simple enough: even though a good soundcard can do more CD quality multi channel sounds then the Z80 sys I made, it still needs a computer system to drive it. And when that is done, there are usually quite annoying delays in that connection. And the whole system is usually not in principle as portable as my sys is when I solder the DMA interface on it. So in short the z80 sys lets me make some quite hefty and nice sounds, played over its little keyboard, whereas otherwise I'd be without, and its display and 40 calculator keys even puts it on top quite some music devices interface wise, and developing ideas on it that fit in its capabilities can be done with very short and potentially quite effective and efficient design cycle, which beyond education let me have a low processing capacity but working microcomputer / synth emulation sys with it.