What's coming in the world of the Studio II


A page of rumours, ideas, possibles..... no guarantee of accuracy or even coherency here :)

Cartridge Dumping

The next cartridge will be the Schoolhouse game "Fun with Numbers".

All I will need is Biorythym, Gunfighter, TV Schoolhouse I and Math Fun of the "official" cartridges, plus the demonstration cartridge and the diagnostic cartirdge.

Information

Scans of the manuals for the uploaded games will become available. At the moment the only instructions are copied off the side of the cartridge.

Emulators

The emulators are more or less complete. I may build a small ultra fast one to run on my antique 286 portable. I am toying with the bizarre idea of supporting "overlays" in the cartridge as a way of getting "colour". This will work a la Space Invaders/Magnavox Odyssey : perhaps :) I have also recieved inquiries re: an Amiga based Studio II emulator.

New Game Development

Nothing planned as I write.

Hardware Version

This is still in the design stage ; basically it will be a Fast Microcontroller, a RAM chip, 2 keypads and a few other discretes. It will connect to a SCART socket. I want it to run all the old games and the new ones. It will probably have the same odd sound hardware as the Studio II eventually. This will be based around my rewrite of Alberto RicciBitti's code.

Technical Information

I plan to discover more about how the wierd NE555 sound circuit works. Basically, it is a bodge ; the warpy sound is got by charging the control pin through a capacitor. Whether you are supposed to do this is debatable ; the internal resistors through which it is charging do not have specific values....

The other big issue is ; what on earth is the EF1 line doing ? Why does the racing game check it ?


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