[Coco] What would your ideal CoCo cartridge do?

[L. Curtis Boyle]

The TC-9 also used 8 bit ADC (and DAC, for sound). We had the driver in OS-9/NitrOS9 defaulting to 6 bit (for compatibility), but with a flag to allow full 8 bit.

L. Curtis Boyle
curtisboyle at sasktel.net



On Oct 28, 2013, at 12:19 PM, Nick Marentes wrote:

> > Is that a joystick interface?
> 
> I guess it could be. The current joystick ports are just a 6 bit ADC multiplexed as 4 ports to give a resolution of 64.
> 
> An 8 bit ADC yields a resolution of 256.
> 
> CoCoMax (and Max-10) was originally sold with a cartridge that had an 8 bit ADC. CoCoMax was hacked to support the standard 6 bit joystick port of the CoCo but in the transition, it lost mouse resolution.
> 
> But this ADC can be used for more than joysticks. It can be used as a real world interface for gathering 8 bit data from external sensors and for audio sampling 8 bits waveforms as opposed to 6 bits using the built in ADC.
> 
> I just thought that adding an ADC would be relatively easy considering that many programmable microcontroller chips nowadays include them anyway and it would complement my idea of utilizing SD card space for sound input & playback.
> 
> So, such a cartridge would not only be a virtual drive cartridge (virtual floppy and Hard Disk) but also a sound card.
> 
> It's nice to dream.   :)
> 
> Nick
> 
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