WHOOPS ! (oh not not him again)

[simon]

Taking the 58 byte player (serviced every 340 cycles) and another idea, musical tapeload....

I put the idea toward sorcahrd (was hmmm... maybe) - i disected the coco basic rom code (byteload/bitin etc) and presented him with what i had found, over the last 3..4 days we have cooked this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99Emr08Vm7A

this can sound alot better if we use a custom tape format... this is bog standard format....

so, seems another of my mad ideas panned out.....

I have to take my hat of to Sorchard for helping me on this one....

/Simon

[robcfg]

Awesome!

With some carefully crafted loading and decompression routines, we may have a killer tape demo like Breaking Baud for the Amstrad CPC.

Keep up the good work!

[simon]

WICKED !!!!

but then the cpc has the AY sound chip.... we only have the DAC, so alot more cpu power required...

/Simon

[sorchard]

It's possible thanks to Simon's 2 voice player. It uses so few cycles it fits comfortably inside half a 2.4Khz tape cycle.

Now we've done it the easy way, we're going to try to do it the hard way and see what we get

That CPC demo is really impressive. Makes we want to dig out my SEM cartridge. Anyone else got one of those?

[robcfg]

What is a SEM cartridge?

Also, the JCB Microsystems cartridge with an AY chip is quite easy to clone... Though it would be nice to use the Dragon sound, it's not a bad alternative.

Edit: Silly me! SEM is the Sound Extension Module from JCB, right? I have the one that is scanned and dumped here in the wiki. It would be nice if Ciaran could add support for that on XRoar.

[simon]

well the AY chip is also stuffed inside the coco SSC (speech sound cartridge)....

but tandy did a *bit* of a botch job.... they stuffed it behind a PIC chip....

yes you can access the AY registers directly (not quite) - it's thru 1 address.... you have to poll to see if the PIC is busy...

/Simon

[simon]

Sorchard

Now we've done it the easy way, we're going to try to do it the hard way and see what we get

YUP !

/Simon

[sorchard]

SEM is the Sound Extension Module from JCB, right? I have the one that is scanned and dumped here in the wiki. It would be nice if Ciaran could add support for that on XRoar.

That's the one. It would be nice if there was support in xroar. I'll probably have a go at this myself eventually, assuming I can actually get the todo list to shrink rather than grow

[Bosco]

I never knew there was an AY chip add-on for the Dragon.

I imagine finding a working SEM cartridge now would be difficult but future XRoar support would still be very cool.

[robcfg]

There was also a speech synthesis cartridge by JCB, plus one with both chips, AY and the SPO256.