[Coco] "Did I do that?"

[Gene Heskett]

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.

Cheers, Gene
-- 
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