[Coco] First MC-10 game cart ever?

[Joe Grubbs]

As always Ed, you're a pioneer! This is pretty cool, and I never thought about the versatility of that expansion port before. Sounds like it is superior to the CoCo's cart port?



________________________________
From: Coco <coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com> on behalf of Zippster <zippster278 at gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, August 9, 2016 4:29 PM
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [Coco] First MC-10 game cart ever?

Not sure...  AFAIK only the 16K RAM expansion was released for MC-10s.
There were though several carts released for the ALICE version in France,
including a joystick adapter.

You can interface just about anything to the expansion port, but adding a
software ROM is not as simple as on the CoCo where you basically wire
a ROM chip to the cart port.  A little more logic is involved, which modern
PLDs make easy.

You can take over darn near every address in the system from the
expansion port (with a few exceptions), so, lots of possibilities. :)

I'm guessing game carts would have been fairly expensive to produce compared
to other systems because of the additional logic and ram that would be required
for a lot of things, yes.

- Ed


> On Aug 9, 2016, at 3:15 PM, Arthur Flexser <flexser at fiu.edu> wrote:
>
> I'm not especially familiar with the MC-10.  But I was surprised to hear
> that there hadn't been previous game cartridges for it, now that I learn
> that it indeed has a cartridge port.  Seems inconsistent with Tandy's
> strategy of aggressively developing and promoting game cartridges for the
> CoCo.
>
> Is it a matter of the MC-10 not having enough RAM to accommodate a game
> cartridge without a memory upgrade, or what?  What did Tandy see as the
> MC-10's niche, if not as a game machine?  Did Tandy release any non-game
> cartridges for the machine?
>
> Art
>


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