[Coco] CoCo Sound Chat and a li'l MiniHog news. Was: New game for CoCo3...

[Chris Spry]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Roger Taylor" <rtaylor at bayou.com>
To: <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Saturday, November 29, 2003 9:02 PM
Subject: Re: [Coco] New game for CoCo3 - new C libraries for RSDOS


> The Orchestra-90CC Pak is a dual 8-bit digital-to-analog converter, so
it's
> a sound card.  The built-in ROM just happens to have a nifty music program
> in it that knows how to pump the waveforms out, but you can always use the
> card manually.
>
> You simply POKE the waveform in real time just like you do with the CoCo's
> 6-bit DAC port, only you have TWO 8-bit ports (for stereo).

True, but you're still taxing the CPU quite a bit to produce sound, which I
would need for all the other operations.  That's why I would use something
like the SS pak, so I could load it with all the sound/music data before a
level would start and then the SS pak would play it on its own, with the CPU
of the CoCo only being used to send requests to the SS pak to do things like
start, stop, play a certain sound in the buffer, etc freeing up a lot of CPU
time.  Now if there was a way to combine a SS pak and an ORCH-90 into one
unit run at 1.78mhz, that'd be the ultimate!

PS to anyone that's been waiting for some kind of MiniHog update:

Tonight, I thought I'd mess around with the CoCo 3's GIME registers and got
it to do some interesting things (Still no 256 color mode, which I'm
starting to think was just a rumor).  Still won't be able to incorporate
horizontal scroll because the new sprite data that would come in after the
scroll will slow everything down, but I've increased the resolution to
320x225.  This would allow the playfield to increase vertically a bit, but
that'd mean I'd have to recreate the levels I have already made to use this
and rewrite my level editor, which would just add too much time, so I might
not do this afterall.  I'm going to make a routine that when Mini reaches
the edge of the screen, the screen will scroll to the next one instead of
just insantly showing up, also allowing you to survey the field a little bit
before continuing so you don't run into something bad that you couldn't see
up ahead!  Using this method will also free up a lot of memory, which if I
wanted to, would allow larger levels but then that'd use a lot more disk
space.  BTW, I was really impressed with the GIME's vert & horz offset
register speed.

-Chris