[Coco] What would your ideal CoCo cartridge do?

Nick Marentes nickma at optusnet.com.au
Mon Oct 28 14:19:50 EDT 2013


 > Is that a joystick interface?

I guess it could be. The current joystick ports are just a 6 bit ADC 
multiplexed as 4 ports to give a resolution of 64.

An 8 bit ADC yields a resolution of 256.

CoCoMax (and Max-10) was originally sold with a cartridge that had an 8 
bit ADC. CoCoMax was hacked to support the standard 6 bit joystick port 
of the CoCo but in the transition, it lost mouse resolution.

But this ADC can be used for more than joysticks. It can be used as a 
real world interface for gathering 8 bit data from external sensors and 
for audio sampling 8 bits waveforms as opposed to 6 bits using the built 
in ADC.

I just thought that adding an ADC would be relatively easy considering 
that many programmable microcontroller chips nowadays include them 
anyway and it would complement my idea of utilizing SD card space for 
sound input & playback.

So, such a cartridge would not only be a virtual drive cartridge 
(virtual floppy and Hard Disk) but also a sound card.

It's nice to dream.   :)

Nick



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