[Coco] My introduction - a newbie

[Joel Ewy]

Dan Olson wrote:
>> With an Orchestra-90 or Speach/Sound cartridge, the Color Computer 3 
>> sound is spectacular.  Using just its own built-in circuitry, the sound 
>> is barely adequate.  In other words, about ten times better than a C-64.
>>     
>
> I always thought of it this way, the CoCo has great sound hardware, it 
> just doesn't come standard with the computer.  BTW, I never found much 
> info on the Orchestra-90 or Speach/Sound cart, I assume both are 
> incompatible, which has the best software support?
>
>  	Dan
>   
I haven't really looked into this question in detail yet, but what I
gather is that there are a number of RS-DOS games that can use the SSC,
but that the Orch-90 is the only one that works at 2MHz (without
modification), so the SSC can't be used in (Nitr)OS-9 LII on the CoCo
3.  Any emulation or reimplementation would have to fix that problem. 
(More likely the problem simply wouldn't arise because all the logic
gates in an FPGA should be capable of the same clock rates, and software
emulation is, well, software.)  I think maybe there is a program that
will play WAV files through the Orch-90 in OS-9.  Am I right about any
of this?

The Orchestra-90 is just a stereo 8-bit audio DAC, and if I understand
correctly, the SSC is a (monaural?) FM synthesizer and hardware speech
synthesizer.  If that's approximately right, then they really perform
complementary functions.  PC sound cards have both functions, and an
updated CoCo design should as well.  And if it's going to be able to
play digitized samples as well as synthesized sounds, it might as well
incorporate these two existing designs.

JCE