[Coco] My introduction - a newbie

[Torsten Dittel]

Joel Ewy schrieb:
 
> As Torsten mentions, the CoCo's built-in sound is not the computer's
> strong point.  However, even with its limited hardware, there are some
> games that make pretty good use of it.  I've always found the explosion
> sounds in Polaris to be quite satisfying.  And Mega Bug (Pac-Man-like)
> says "We Gotcha" when you lose.  Dungeons of Daggorath makes a heartbeat
> sound that speeds up as your health declines and slows down as you
> rest.  Recent discussions on this list have re-ignited my interest in
> the Orchestra 90CC.  I may get it out again and plug it in.

Yep, Polaris hat great sound! I liked that game a lot. IMHO the more
interesting cartridge is the SSC. I once started thinking about adding
background music (ATARI ST soundfiles) to CoCo games using the SSC and
learned about the sound chip and its registers and how to convert the
files, but some people here figured out that the SSC's "CPU" is
delivering the register data much too slow to the soundchip (I though it
would be easy, only 14 register updates max. per 1/50 (1/60) seconds).
So I never tried it by myself. If I should ever start this project again
I'll figure out how much CPU-cyles *exactly* it needs to update a
certain amount of registers. The number of register updates could be
highly reduced anyway by analyzing, pre-processing and that way
compressing the sound file.

Regards,
Torsten