[Coco] Orchestra 90CC - my 2 cents worth

[John Strong]

Not many games used the  Orchestra 90CC as it was a cpu resource hog :) and 
was initially too expensive, hence few users owned one.  However, my games 
were written late in the CoCo's life and the price had dropped on the 
Orchestra 90CC.   Being a simple digital to analog converter, the bit rate 
was determined by the software driving it

Soviet Bloc & Gem did not use sampled sound, but used delay loops to create 
the needed sounds.


BTW, Gems was based on Segs's Columns game.

  John Strong
  StrongWare


> > "According to L. Curtis Boyle's games list, John R. Strong still sells
> > two games for $15 each that support the Orchestra-90 CC: Soviet Bloc,
> > which is a Tetris clone, and Gems, which looks like a game called
> > JewelBox that I've played in Linux.
> >
> > It looks like Ghana Bwana, Adventure In Mythology, Lansford Mansion,
> > Gantlet, The Interbank Incident, Gold Runner II, and Martian Crypt
> > support the SSC if present."
> >
> > The Orch-90 is used more for music.
>
>      I should mention that I have made quick patches to OS-9 games (and
>OS-9/NitrOS9 itself) to use the Orch-90 for full 8 bit sound, including
>Kyum-Gai:To Be Ninja (which actually has 8 bit samples in the code; it
>masks out the unused 2 bits). I even had plans to add stereo support to
>the standard OS-9 calls, but never quite got that far (the TC-9 driver did
>use native 8 bit sound, though, and it would work fine with the Orch-90
>pak as well).
>
>
>--
>L. Curtis Boyle
>

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