[Coco] My introduction - a newbie

[Torsten Dittel]

> One thing I haven't had the chance to check is CoCo 3's sound quality.
> Could you please tell me more about it? My favorite 8 bit sound is
> Commodore 64's.

Yeah, the SID is great. The CoCo1/2/3s don't have a soundchip at all.
Sound output is mainly done with a mono 6-bit-DAC. It needs a lot of CPU
cycles to frequently output the samples, so you'll hardly find fast
games with multivoice background music like on the C=64. However, there
were some expansion Paks out there, the Orchestra 90 CC adding a second
channel and expanding the sound (samples) to 8-bit and the
Speech-Sound-Cartridge (SSC) adding a voice synthesizer and a Yamaha
sound chip like the one used in the ATARI ST. It's possible to root the
cartidges sound to the CoCo's sound outputs. A few games really used it.

Regards,
Torsten

PS: Try to find me in the http://coco3.com chatroom or here:
ICQ: 192164083
Yahoo! ID: torstencito
E-mail: OS-9<at>TRS-80.CC (replace <at> with @)