[Coco] speech/orch pak

[Willard Goosey]

>Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2004 14:42:50 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Robert Emery <theother_bob at yahoo.com>
> 
>> I have a general question for everyone. I never owned a speech or orchestra
>> pak. How did it work? Could you use it in conjunction with a multipak and
>> other rompaks or is that not workable- don't laugh at my ignorance, I am
>> trying to learn :)

Others have discussed the Speech/Sound pak.

The Orchestra 90cc was a ROM, and a pair of memory-mapped latches with
D to A converters (resistor bridges) going to the RCA jacks.  The ROM
software fakes being a 4-voice synthesizer.  It actually sounds pretty
good, but a CoCo can't really do much else while running music through
it.  

The Orc port (as I tend to call it) can be to used either with an MPI
or by itself.  The ROM knows about cassette and disk I/O, and even has
a minimal terminal program for downloading songs off Compuserve with a
modem card.

There's also a version of the CoCo software that doesn't require the
Orc port, but it doesn't sound as good, as it uses the CoCo's internal
6-bit mono sound instead of 8-bit stereo. :-)

There's not a lot of other software supporting the Orc port.  I think
Sock Master's mod player can use it.  I'm not seriously into music, so
I'm not the best one to ask about that.

Apparently the Orc-90CC is simply the CoCo version of a device for the
Model I/III/4 line.  There are LOTS of songs available for it.  Going
the other way, there are winamp plugins to play orc-port songs on
non-CoCo hardware.  Check out Ira' page at http://www.trs-80.com/

The songs are stored in an ASCII music language.  The ROM compiles
this into something it can sling out the D-to-A's but there's no
provision for saving/loading the binary data.  The ROM has a typical
CoCo line editor built in.

Willard
-- 
Willard Goosey  goosey at sdc.org
Socorro, New Mexico, USA
"I've never been to Contempt!  Isn't that somewhere in New Mexico?"
   --- Yacko