[Coco] So, my CoCo 3 may be having some trouble

[Bill Pierce]

Thanks Tormod,
I'm not real familiar with the pinouts of carts. I only had a few "simple" carts back in the 80s EdtAsm, a couple of games, and the Orch90 was one of them. It stayed in a "taped" state from the time I discovered the feature to the present day. If I wanted to use the Orch90 rom, I would just enter EXEC&HC000. I then got a disk drive (and Midi software) and didn't have an MPI so I quit using it except for special ocassions when showing off some of my old custom "stereo" software.

I had a Casio SK-1 sampling keyboard with 5 "user" sample slots. Remember the TV commercials of the kid playing "Jingle Bells" with samples of his dog barking? I connected the two outputs of the Orch90 pak to 2 channels of a little RS 4 channel mixer. That way I could custom mix the two outputs to one channel. The SK-1 had a 1/8th in. microphone input that I connected to the output of the mixer.
I used the SK-1 in the band I was playing in. I would have the Coco set up on the top tier of my keyboard stand. My custom software would play stereo samples to the SK-1 and one by one I would load them into the 5 banks on the SK-1 for each song when I needed them. The SK-1's onboard sounds were horrible, but with my samples, I could produce the sounds of real strings and organs as well as special effects. I sampled these sounds into the Coco using the 6 bit input on the joystick port for greatest fidelity. My software had an editor in which I could edit the waveform itself as well as attack, sustain, decay and release. It also expanded the frequency to that of an 8 bit sample for the Orch90 which was 8 bit output. The software allowd storage of 10 small samples with playback of any one or two samples in stereo.
The lead singer of the band would get mad everytime he had to wait for me to load samples from cassette before we could start a song ! 

Bill Pierce
My Music from the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer 2 & 3
https://sites.google.com/site/dabarnstudio/
Co-Webmaster of The TRS-80 Color Computer Archive
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E-Mail: ooogalapasooo at aol.com




-----Original Message-----
From: Tormod Volden <lists.tormod at gmail.com>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Sat, Aug 17, 2013 3:30 am
Subject: Re: [Coco] So, my CoCo 3 may be having some trouble


On Sat, Aug 17, 2013 at 2:09 AM, Bill Pierce wrote:
>
> Chris,
> Yes, I think so, so if either side makes contact, the cart will auto boot. So 
wrap a small stripp of tape around to each side of the contacts

Robert Gault explains this very well here:
http://aaronwolfe.com/robert.gault/Coco/Unpublished/CART2RAM.html

Whether pin 7 (top) and pin 8 (bottom) are on the far left side
depends on the number of pins on the cartridge. Chris's PNG is of a
28-pin cartridge where pins 1-6 and 35-40 are missing (quite common, I
believe).

Tormod

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