[Coco] Speech Systems Symphony 12 & Piano attachment

[Brian Blake]

On Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 5:49 PM Andrew Ayers via Coco <coco at maltedmedia.com>
wrote:

> If I had to guess, the cartridge with the ribbon cable probably did
> attach to the piano keyboard...but the cartridge that had the DIN was
> likely a MIDI input cartridge; I'm not a musician or anything like that,
> and only briefly played with real MIDI stuff in high school (circa
> 1990-91) - but I seem to recall that everything MIDI back then (and
> probably still today) used DIN plug cables.
>


Yes, but the USB interface even for MIDI has become quite popular. But yeah
I certainly agree about the cart with the DIN connector being a MIDI cart.



> So the cart with the ribbon cable was just a basic kind of keyboard
> interface, but the keyboard wasn't MIDI; but I bet at some point (again,
> pure guessing) that Speech Systems either did away with the the "raw
> keyboard" design, and found a keyboard that output MIDI,



I don't know how long the ley bed approach was used for. But the apparent
theory was to use the 8 x 8 matrix from a keyboard to turn the CoCo itself
into a synthesizer. The cart in question uses a 68B21 and two smaller chips
to decode. The keybed itself had no electronics at all.

or they put
> circuitry inside the raw keyboard to turn it into a MIDI output
> keyboard, or they just stopped selling the keyboard with the cart,
> making it optional (if they didn't drop it completely).
>

Several software packages used it, from Symphony to Real Talker.



>
> The latter seems really possible, as it would be more likely that anyone
> who wanted a MIDI cartridge for the CoCo likely already had a keyboard
> with MIDI output, or full MIDI (IE, both input and output/pass-thru
> ports; IIRC, MIDI is a daisy-chain I/O bus?).
>
>
There were a number of MIDI carts out for the CoCo, and it looks like
Speech Systems had at least two, maybe three before Lester Hands took over.
I'm trying to track down when exactly SS stopped advertising and Rualaford
Research started selling the CoCoMIDI 3. This device came with software to
talk to a synthesizer thru MIDI, and according to the ads worked with
Musica and a few other packages.

The piano keybed itself morphed as well. SS offered, I think, a 28 key, 49
key and later a 61 key key bed to interface with the Symphony, Musica and
Synther 77 (and later Lyra) software. I think today, and this may be
incorrect, the keybed would be referred to as a MIDI controller since it
has no actual MIDI electronics itself. This has been a much deeper dive
than I'd anticipated...