Conversions - which of the 8-bit platforms is closest to the Atari?

[Rybags]

What I meant was timers with sufficient resolution and low overhead for digital sample playback.

I'm fairly sure the early CoCo at least can't swap out the OS and replace the hardware vectors like we can, which could mean they're stuck with the interrupt processing overhead which potentially could be fairly big.

[Robert Cook]

1 hour ago, Rybags said:

What I meant was timers with sufficient resolution and low overhead for digital sample playback.

I'm fairly sure the early CoCo at least can't swap out the OS and replace the hardware vectors like we can, which could mean they're stuck with the interrupt processing overhead which potentially could be fairly big.

The CoCo 1/2 does not appear to have timer interrupts (while the CoCo 3 does have a high-resolution timer that can trigger an IRQ, and people make a bit deal out of this enhancement).  It does have an H-sync interrupt (FIRQ) in addition to V-sync, though.  This fires at 16 kHz, which seems rather on the high side to me, but that depends on how much overhead one is willing to put up with.  16 kHz would obviously incur a lot of overhead.

 

ROM can be swapped for RAM in the CoCo 1/2, by the way, so it might indeed have been the lack of a precision timer interrupt (or any at all) that discouraged making quality music on the CoCo, as you suggested.

Edited July 14 by Robert Cook

[Rybags]

Probably a HBlank interrupt like the ST has - every scanline with no other option.

Likely the 6809 at 0.9 MHz would be too slow to utilize that very well.