hdufort

You can contact Neil Blanchard. http://retrotinker.blogspot.ca/2016/06/sega-genesis-joypad-adapter-for-coco3.html

The Speech/Sound Pack cart was not widely used. It was used in 20 games, usually in a limited way. I remember people demonstrating only 1 or 2 games making use of it... Pitfall 2 and Ghana Bwana if i remember well. The SSP is rare and people are mostly looking for it from a collector's point of view. This cart is not using any standard part from the industry and has limited capabilities. John Linville's cart-with-audio project is promising, as it integrates a TI SN76489 8-bit chip, which was originally used on the TI99/4 computer. It will allow me/other developers to distribute their game on a cartridge with enhances the Coco's audio capabilities in a realistic way from a retro-computing's point of view. There were talks about adopting a Yamaha YM2203 chip but the community is moving towards the TI solution. You are right about the original MPIs, they are expensive and rare now, and they require a modification to work on the Coco3. The miniMPI is a good choice if you want to have a diskette drive and the SDC in parallel, or Orchestra90 and another cart.

I'm from the Coco community so I'll try to make a case. Many peripherals were developed over the last few years, notably: - the miniMPI, which allows 2 cartridges to be inserted at the same time - the cocoSDC, which replaces a drive controller with a SD card reader - various VGA video adapters - joystick and keyboard adapters - hi-res mouse adapter - a cartridge with an integrated 8-bit audio chip is being developed; games on cart will have better music and sounds - a better 512kb memory expansion board which generates much less heat - replacing the Motorola 6809 with a Hitachi 6309, which allows additional opcodes, and paves the way for more efficient programs - drivewire, which allows you to connect your Coco to your PC through a serial-to-USB cable, for file access and lots of other functionalities - the hardware community is very active and is actually gaining momentum On the software side, lots of projects as well: - homebrew games such as Popstar*Pilot, which looks gorgeous - Fahrfall, first physical cartridge game to be made in the 21th century! - NitrOS9, an OS9 distribution with lots of recent improvements, manages up to 2mb RAM, runs multiple programs simultaneously - text editors, file managers, etc., for OS9 - Donkey Kong Remastered, which takes the actual arcade code and ports it to the Coco3 while adding new levels - music trackers using the 6-bit DAC - my own homebrew game project (Kaboomerang Kim), which is still under development but looks promising - many projects and programming challenges in the community - most projects target the vanilla Coco2 or Coco3 (128kb or 512kb) which means any physical machine or emulator will run them Events - The annual CocoFest in Chicago, after a few "calmer" years, is getting more popular - Tandy Assembly event in October 2017 - Coco/Dragon events in Europe - etc. Tools - The LWASM suite makes it easy to compile 6809 and 6309 code - Lots of documentation online, including modern reference materials in PDF - A cocoSDC distribution which contains pretty much everything ever released for the Coco - Three emulators actively maintained: VCC, MAME/MESS and Xroar People - many Coco enthusiasts, dubbed "coco-nuts", are very active online - 2 series of podcasts covering lots of subjects and letting people participate live - some of the iconic/legendary developers drop by from time to time ps: A video showing recent developments in my game project Kaboomerang Kim: