New on the blog: wrapping up this little adventure by taking the CoCo's little 6-bit DAC that you use to cycle-count out square waves and making it into a 3-voice polyphonic synthesizer with custom waveforms for each voice.
A lot of the inspiration for this was drawn from the design of the Apple IIgs's Ensoniq chip, but it's also nice how even when the design goes its own way the pieces fall neatly into place.
https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2024/04/06/softsoniq-cycle-counting-out-polyphonic-music/
This week on the blog: The CoCo's 6809 chip is much more amenable to "normal" programming techniques than other 8-bits, so I implement a proper recursive flood-fill, and apply it to some graphics from an old type-in.
Refreshingly straightforward. The *rest* of that type-in will be covered next week and will be far more silly and intricate. >:)
https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2024/03/30/flood-fills-on-the-coco-and-the-dragon/
New on the blog: I implement a reasonably flexible point-and-line-drawing library for the CoCo/Dragon, building on the earlier graphics-mode work.
https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2024/03/23/building-a-bitmap-graphics-library-for-the-dragon/
This week on the blog: Experimenting with graphics modes on the CoCo/Dragon. Also, incidentally, getting around to actually learning what it takes to write Hello World because after several sizable projects I somehow neglected some of those basics.
https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2024/03/09/text-i-o-and-graphics-modes-on-the-dragon-coco/
New on the blog, I get a digital sound clip out of the Dragon. This is close enough to stuff I already did on the Sega Genesis that the hardest part is finding a place to put the clip data.
Also, a minute and a half of cassette data to load four seconds of audio. Pristine.
https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2024/03/02/the-dragon-roars/
New on the Blog: apparently I just skipped "Hello World" when writing stuff for the Dragon and went straight to "LZ4 decompressor." The 6809 chip certainly encourages you to hit the ground running, at this rate.
https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2024/02/24/lz4-decompression-on-the-6809/
It is now the Year of the Dragon! There is no better time for me to kick off my experiments with the Dragon series of early-1980s home computers. This seems to be another case of those odd beasts where the clones end up more influential and famous than the originals (In this case, the Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer).
I've been meaning to learn about the 6809 CPU for quite awhile. This will be a fine excuse.
https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2024/02/10/the-year-of-the-dragon/
You know what year it is? The Lunar New Year! Since it is 2024 it falls onto to be the Year of the Dragon!
But, you know what also has dragon in its name? The Dragon 32 and Dragon 64 home computers that were built in the 1980s by Dragon Data!
#Tech #Computer #RetroTech #Retro #RetroTechnology #RetroComputers #VintageComputer #RetroComputing #Dragon32 #Dragon64 #DragonData
sam 
McMartin
Sinclair-Speccy