[Coco] "Did I do that?"

[Bill Gunshannon]

> On Thursday 02 May 2013 22:18:55 Kip Koon did opine:
>
>> Allen,
>> Congratulations!  I didn't know you had done that either.  Heck, I
>> didn't even know the Coco could talk directly to midi.
>
> Not only that, Kip, but you can assign an output port to an instrument on
> a
> per instrument basis.  At one point, probably 17 years ago now, I had 2
> rs232 packs in mine, one with the crystal changed so it would run at 31250
> baud and drive a midi keyboard.  So I was sending some instruments to a
> cz101 thru the rs232 port, and some to an MT-240 via the bit banger.  A
> sneaky way to get around the 4 note polyphony of the MT240 and the 8 note
> limit of the CZ-101 with those two keyboards.
>
>> Now to get a zillion slot Multipak so I can plug all this up together on
>> my Coco 3!
>> Has anyone made the 8-slot MultiPak yet?  If so, I'd like to buy a PCB
>> from you so I can build my own.  Thanks in advance.
>
> I looked at it, but the limited I/O space of the coco3 pretty much killed
> that idea.  Sticking the GIME shadow registers smack in the middle of what
> little I/O space we had was one of tandy's almost unforgiveable blunders.
> The other was decoding only down to a $20 byte space.  Both of those
> blunders should have been hanging offenses.
>

Never looked deep enough to see any of this.  Interesting.

So, a new question.  If the COCO design is flawed, what about looking
at making the COCO4 :-) a totally new design using 6[83]09 without any
of these shortcomings and then adding COCO emulation as a possible
feature?  Don't know what it would take, but it could be a way to
meet everyone's expectations and lower the complexity which would, in
turn, keep the cost down a bit.  As well as allowing for even greater
future expansion.

bill

-- 
Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves
billg999 at cs.scranton.edu |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton   |
Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include <std.disclaimer.h>