[Coco] First MC-10 game cart ever?

[Keith]

According to the Wikipedia page TRS-80 MC-10, "Although the memory expansion 
interface connected directly to the CPU bus and could have been used for 
many applications, the edge connector involved had an unusual number of pins 
and was difficult to obtain." As Ed pointed out these limitations can be 
overcome with today's technology. Good creativity and knowledge on Ed's part 
to pull this off.

-----Original Message----- 
From: Zippster
Sent: Tuesday, August 09, 2016 1:29 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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