[Coco] Speech/Sound Cartridge Emulation just added to MAME

[Steve Strowbridge]

This is nothing short of amazing, and thank you, Tim and everyone else who
worked towards making this a reality, it's truly remarkable.
I have been asking this questions since I hit the scene, why hasn't this
been emulated, why couldn't it be included in other devices like the
CoCoSDC, etc.
I didn't know then, what I have since learned, that the SS/C is more than
just a sound chip , or set of chips, there is a interface in front of those
chips that make the device hard to even code for.  I will probably hit you
up directly to better understand how to get a good MAME setup with this, I
see what you're saying here, but it's a little over my head, especially on
the compiler part.

Hopefully this knowledge can be applied to not only adding SS/C to other
emulators, but maybe even getting a hardware clone implementation.
They are very hard to find on Ebay, and require an MPI so it's not
something everyone can have access to.
While there are dozens of games that took advantage of the card, only 2
come to mind that used the music feature of it the first was GHANA BWANA
(forgive me if I spelled that wrong), and the most famous it Pitfall II
with it's never ending multi-voice background music.
The F-16 or F-18 Diecom game made great use of the sound effects channels
with explosions, etc., and everybody else just used the lame speech, which
was the least impressive part of that device.

My initial wish for having the SS/C cloned was to take advantage of the
games that supported it, not expecting new games to be developed for it,
but learning the few games that really used it well, it's probably not
worth the effort to make one, however, if it gets added to some sort of
"super cart" count me in for a pre-order, just because, or as we say,
Because CoCo!

I'd love to revisit some of the games I recorded on the SSC with MAME and
get much better quality video captures of them once I figure out how to use
all this.

Thanks again!


Steve Strowbridge, aka
The Original Gamer Stevie Strow
http://ogsteviestrow.com
ogsteviestrow at gmail.com


On Thu, Jun 1, 2017 at 10:31 AM, tim lindner <tlindner at macmess.org> wrote:

> The MAME that will be released on June 28th (0.187), will include a
> new slot device that allows everyone to emulate the S/SC with the CoCo
> drivers.
>
> If you compile MAME on your own, you can test it out now by
> downloading the official source:
>
> https://github.com/mamedev/mame
>
> This is something I've been working on for a long time. But I'd first
> like to thank a few people who helped:
>
> 0. Nathan Woods - for his tireless work on the CoCo drivers in MAME.
> 1. Frank Palazzolo - for dumping the ROM in the PIC-7040 (neé TMS-7040).
> 2. hap - for writing the TMS-7000 microcontroller core.
> 3. Joe Zibiciak - for all his work on the SP0256 speech chip reverse
> engineering and emulation.
> 4. Couriersud, RBelmont - for the AY8910 Programable Sound Generator
> emulation, a long time core in MAME
>
> The new ROMSET can be downloaded here:
>
> http://www.macmess.org/downloads/coco_ssc.zip
>
> It contains the masked ROM from the microcontroller and Speech chip.
>
> To activate the slot device, put the ROMSET in your ROMs folder, and
> "insert" the S/SC into the expansion port like this:
>
> ./mame64 coco2b -ext ssc
>
> Using it with a floppy disk controller will require a Multi-Pak (just
> like real hardware):
>
> ./mame64 coco2b -ext multi -ext:multi:slot3 ssc -flop1 SSC.dsk
>
> The floppy controller is automatically in slot 4 so you don't have to
> specify it.
>
> Here is a link to a disk image of sample programs:
>
> http://www.macmess.org/downloads/SSC.dsk
>
> Here is a list of programs that use the S/SC:
>
> http://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/Speech/Sound_Cartridge_(26-3144A)
>
> And here is the link to my page about this device that includes
> everything I know about it:
>
> http://tlindner.macmess.org/?page_id=96
>
> --
> --
> tim lindner
>
> "Proper User Policy apparently means Simon Says."
>
> --
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>