[Coco] First MC-10 game cart ever?
Zippster
zippster278 at gmail.com
Tue Aug 9 16:29:32 EDT 2016
Not sure… AFAIK only the 16K RAM expansion was released for MC-10s.
There were though several carts released for the ALICE version in France,
including a joystick adapter.
You can interface just about anything to the expansion port, but adding a
software ROM is not as simple as on the CoCo where you basically wire
a ROM chip to the cart port. A little more logic is involved, which modern
PLDs make easy.
You can take over darn near every address in the system from the
expansion port (with a few exceptions), so, lots of possibilities. :)
I’m guessing game carts would have been fairly expensive to produce compared
to other systems because of the additional logic and ram that would be required
for a lot of things, yes.
- Ed
> On Aug 9, 2016, at 3:15 PM, Arthur Flexser <flexser at fiu.edu> wrote:
>
> I'm not especially familiar with the MC-10. But I was surprised to hear
> that there hadn't been previous game cartridges for it, now that I learn
> that it indeed has a cartridge port. Seems inconsistent with Tandy's
> strategy of aggressively developing and promoting game cartridges for the
> CoCo.
>
> Is it a matter of the MC-10 not having enough RAM to accommodate a game
> cartridge without a memory upgrade, or what? What did Tandy see as the
> MC-10's niche, if not as a game machine? Did Tandy release any non-game
> cartridges for the machine?
>
> Art
>
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