Orchestra-90 CC

[pser1]

Awesome that it works! Unlike my speech-sound pak, it's not just a peripheral cartridge, it comes (as Sorchard says) with a program for building and playing its own format of score files. The keyboard mapping is a pain - I'm hoping I can work out how to patch the ROM so it works on the Dragon (although I'm currently stuck on getting gdb to compile on my Mac, but that's another story). Hopefully I can post my script and stuff later this weekend.

I think Pere (Pser1) had it running in a multi-cart setup and worked out how to poke it directly?

Tony

Hi all
yes, I have the Tandy Orchestra-90cc in slot 2 of my MPI. To use it without the ROM, it is enough to have selected another slot, then you can access both A/D converters
at $FF7A for left channel and $FF7B for the right. Of course a small piece of tape does the trick too, but then I have not been able to start the internal ROM then it seems to
requiere an IRQ to start properly.
This gives a hint to work with it as we have the ROM dumped ...
Maybe we could switch to MAP1 and then load the ROM at $C000 and try to patch it there. The ROM is exactly 8k long, so no extra space in it to use, but in RAM we could use
$E000 on to put the patches we should need ... just brainstorming. And the ROM should be called from a 'forced' IRQ redirecting the vector to $C000 (maybe this could work)
As the code at $C000 changes the stack position without savig a copy of the received one, it is better for the program to refuse to quit or it would probably crash.
Unfortunately the keyboard is the CoCo one, so are the disk routines it calls. Both would require patches
If you need someone to make tests on this, you can count on me.

cheers
pere

[pser1]

@Tony
I have been comparing the original .ASC file with your converted .CAS and was thinking of making a Java app
to do that work on all the files in a folder ... (on my Windows machine)
But to verify that the result is OK, I would like to compare not only one file (axelf) but some others too.
Would you, please, upload one or two more .CAS examples for me to test?

thanks in advance
cheers
pere

[tjewell]

Hi Pere,

I've attached my perl script (as a zip, because I can't upload .pl files?) - it simply takes .asc file and produces a .cas file, eg:

./asc2cas.pl axelf.asc > axel.cas

Feel free to use it as inspiration!

Hi everyone else - if you're looking for a source of .asc files, here's a great archive:

http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Orchestra-90/

My script has managed to convert all the examples I've downloaded so far, but I'm sure there's still some that will give problems. 99% of the time, it's to do with splitting long lines.

Cheers, Tony

[pser1]

Hi Tony,
great work!
I have downloaded it ... will have to search for Perl in order to install it in my Windows 7.
Next step for the real Cartridge would be some sort of program to convert the other files
in that web, the .ORC ones so that we could load them via tape recorder cable too.

thanks a lot for sharing this converter!

cheers
pere

[pser1]

@Tony
I have installed Strawberry Pearl for Windows 64 bits. Immediately have run:
perl asc2cas.pl axelf2.asc >axelf2.cas --- because if not redirected, the output goes to the screen.
The result is a file 2599 bytes long but the one you uploaded was 2749 bytes long
The main difference is that the tape header is much longer in yours.
All of the files I have tested, have generatyed a CAS file that contains as name "TONYTEST"

Maybe the pl you uploaded is not the same you used to generate the axelf2.cas that is in this thread
Any idea of what am I doing wrong?

cheers
pere

[tjewell]

Hi Pere, you're doing nothing wrong!

The test file I generated for you previously wasn't *quite* generated by my script. I generated it with an older version, loaded it, spotted a small error which I manually fixed in the Orch-90 editor, then saved it again out of Orch-90. That's the version I uploaded - which is why it has more header and a proper file name. So that test file is possibly best ignored.

I guess my script could use the filename it's been given on the command line to generate the tape header name too, rather than my hardwired 'tonytest'! I'll stick that in later.

Cheers, Tony

[pser1]

Hi Tony,
I took randomly from folder 'A' these files:
ATHENA --- produces ERR 7 just loading
ATRAIN --- loads, but the produces ERR 2 when scoring (command 'S')
AVMRIA --- loads, scores and plays alright
AXELF2 --- loads, but the produces ERR 2 when scoring (command 'S')

I have made all of these tests with XRoar emulating a Dragon 64 without DOS
Have you any hint to correct these errors?
thanks in advance

cheers
pere

[tjewell]

Okay, I made a bad assumption about line wrapping, which I've now changed!

My script now produces files that load for all your examples - ATRAIN is particularly jolly

Cheers, Tony

[tjewell]

Oh, and I fixed the names too - it now uses the filename, as opposed to 'TONYTEST'.

I got all excited this morning when an Orchestra-90 appeared on eBay - only to find it's the TRS-80 version. Pah.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/TRS-80-Orches ... 1831519444?

[pser1]

Hi Tony,
thanks a lot for the new version.
I will try it this afternoon and tell you how it goes for me!

Good luck hunting the Orchestra cartridge. Right now the price seems affordable. But bids use to arise
in the very last minute!

cheers
pere

EDIT. Sorry, I didn't read the whole message and so, I didn't notice it was the Orchestra90 instead of the 90cc
But ... maybe it could work anyway, just changing the internal ROM for a burned one with the CoCo one
One never knows (?)
Have you a Dragon 32 or a Dragon64?