@misterbean971

1 year ago

The tape drive was a consideration that was allegedly going to be enabled in a future version. The feature is alleged to be disabled inside Mikey itself. If that's true, the feature might be possible in a modified FPGA version of the IC. If there's an external jumper or something, I've never heard developers discuss it and I haven't noticed it. In my experiments a very long time ago, the game I used for the test would freeze at what I presumed to be a load point in the code with the cart removed. The system was originally designed to allow a cart to be passed around for multiplayer. You can probably guess that would have been a serious loss in game sales. In your other video, you pondered the motor line. As far as I recall, the motor line was also part of the tape drive mechanism.

I also looked very closely at building a mod board for stereo sound on Lynx I. Unfortunately, having a look at Mikey left me with the impression that the IC versions between Lynx I and II Mikeys are different and the second channel audio out is not even present on Lynx I Mikey pins, though they knew stereo sound would be added later. It's tough to believe, with IC manufacturing costs what they were, that notoriously economical Atari would have ordered multiple custom ICs that all perform the same major functions. Very wasteful. If it was Epyx, I'm equally surprised they would choose to waste that money.

|