Atarivox & 2-Player Simultaneous Support?

[electronicsibley]

Not sure if this has been covered, but I’m interested in how difficult it would be to hardware mod a 7800 to allow simultaneous use of the Atarivox and dual-stick control. T:me Salvo is the game I have in mind to take advantage of this, but having the capability would open up lots of homebrew and hack opportunities as well. 
 

I’m guessing this would be difficult at best, on a hardware AND software level. Has anyone given this much thought?

[+Karl G]

There's a "quadtari" in the works that could multiplex each joystick port to allow for 3/4 player joystick games, or to allow two joysticks in one port, and the AtariVox in the other. Game would have to be coded or modified to take advantage of this, though.

[electronicsibley]

36 minutes ago, Karl G said:

There's a "quadtari" in the works that could multiplex each joystick port to allow for 3/4 player joystick games, or to allow two joysticks in one port, and the AtariVox in the other. Game would have to be coded or modified to take advantage of this, though.

Interesting. I’ll look that up!

[electronicsibley]

20 hours ago, Karl G said:

There's a "quadtari" in the works that could multiplex each joystick port to allow for 3/4 player joystick games, or to allow two joysticks in one port, and the AtariVox in the other. Game would have to be coded or modified to take advantage of this, though.

Yup. Just for posterities sake, it looks like the Quadtari will do exactly what I was inquiring about - allowing 2-player/2-joystick single player games to work while keeping the second controller port open for a Save Key or  Atarivox. Very exciting! 

[Lynxpro]

Stuff like this makes me wonder if the AtariVox could run on the [extremely slow/low bandwidth] Expansion Port. Sending signals to it should be as meager as sending instructions to a LaserDisc player which was the actual purpose of that port...

 

Then again, a micro-controller on Joystick Port 2 should be able to resolve such issues if the games are programmed for it. After all, Atari/GCC had a proprietary chip to handle such activity on the unreleased 7800 Keyboard that would've plugged in there and actually offered a fully-functioning SIO port w/o even using a PIA chip, according to Curt.

Edited September 8, 2020 by Lynxpro

[CPUWIZ]

That port is a huge disappointment, I am however working on a device for it.

[electronicsibley]

10 hours ago, CPUWIZ said:

That port is a huge disappointment, I am however working on a device for it.

My 7800 doesn’t have the port unfortunately. I wonder what percentage of consoles in circulation actually have it?