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Adding a POKEY to the 7800 Concerto cart


RickR

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I thought I'd just share how easy it is to add a POKEY sound chip to a Concerto cart to get the improved sound on games like Ballblazer.  I realized I had a donor 5200 board and pulled a POKEY from that.  It simply plugs right in to the socket on the Concerto and works straight away.

Some notes:  User batari at the Atari Age forums created the Concerto cart.  He also is selling a drop-in replacement for the POKEY called "HOKEY" for a really low price.  Also, the production Concerto carts being sold now have the option of having  HOKEY included.  Clearly that's the way to go.  My Concerto is "pre-production", and it has worked really well for me. 

 

7800 POKEY 001.JPG

7800 POKEY 003.JPG

7800 POKEY 005.JPG

7800 POKEY 006.JPG

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I have a HOKEY in my concerto that I picked up at PRGE. However, I have seen some graphical glitches on a few games like Commando and speaking of that, the audio is still not quite right in some places with the HOKEY in place. Fred has confirmed these issues and states he is looking into it. In the meantime, I've put a spare HOKEY into my older Mateos 16 in 1 cart as for what I use that for these days, the HOKEY is fine for it and will stick with using my DragonFly for actual multi game playing until the 7800GD comes out.

HOKEY is a great thing to see and have, but it does require some specific tweaks to make it work on a game by game basis. All of the new homebrew releases for the 7800 at PRGE that required POKEY audio in fact used HOKEYs in them, but each game required the HOKEY to be tweaked to sound correctly and I think on some of the games, the code on them had to be altered for the HOKEY to work. So even popping in a normal POKEY into those games might not work due to the changes needed for the HOKEY to work in them. But I'm not cracking open my Popeye or Petscii Robots carts to test that.

I do hope that whatever small issues remain with the HOKEY, Fred is able to iron out soon and able to provide a means to update the current ones. 

 

See what I'm up to over at the Ivory Tower Collections: http://www.youtube.com/ivorytowercollections

 

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