Csound is back on the Mainframe after a 40 year absence
Aug 10, 2012
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Episode description
Here's one that took a while to make. I was able to build Csound v5 under Linux on an IBM mainframe Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL), thanks to an IBM developer program. Csound is back on the mainframe after not seeing such an architecture for probably 40 years. It runs pretty fast, but that's not the reason to build it on the platform. I just wanted to understand the challenges of moving to the s390x architecture, since I sell mainframes for a living, and most of my customers have Linux today.
Today's version of June Gloom was converted from my source code to Csound input on my PC under Free Pascal, shipped to the mainframe as drum12.csd, then processed by Csound on the mainframe to create a .wav file. I brought that back to my PC to create an MP3 file and posted here.
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