[sdiy] synth chip

[Andrew "Skippy" Martens]

> Also, you could go the DSP route.  The
> Motorolla 56303 has a lot of horse power and you can implement a pretty
> nice synth in one of those (Clavia has demonstrated this with their Nord
> series).

A good choice - I was taking a look at doing a DSP synth the other day.
Still haven't gotten around to it because I don't trust my skills in
soldering anything with such a fine pitch between pins.  Alternately, you
could look at TI's 32C6711 (was that it?) demo board... I think I read that
it does up to 1200 MIPS at only 150 MHz (if you can parallelize the
functional units enough), and it was only about $280 US for the full eval
kit.

If you want to fiddle with older chips, I had been trying to dig up info on
the old Portia (more popularly known as "Paula") chip from the Amiga.  I
couldn't find much more than a pinout, the fact that it's a 48-pin PDIP, MOS
8364, and has 4 channels of 8-bit AM.  Oh yeah, Commodore part 252127-01 for
the ceramic R4 version, 252127-02 for the plastic R7 version, and the SMT R7
variant, 391077-01.

The other chip I had looked into was the sound chip from the Apple ][ GS,
the Ensoniq 5503 DOC-Chip.  I had some better specs somewhere on how to
program it, but I don't remember much about it at the moment.

>     But, as far as analog synths on a chip...we are probably out of luck
> on this score.  Aliesis, of course, has their Andromada, which is all
> analog, and since Aliesis just recently bit the big one, we might
> (although, I doubt it), see these chips show up on the surplus market.

Hadn't some other company decided to take Alesis over and continue their
product line?  I remember being disappointed about the news initially until
I read that - so there's still some hope for the Andromeda.

> > I know there's the SID6581, the
> > TI76477, and apparently some Curtis chips, but these are all long
> > gone aside from surplus and salvage.

The TI76477?  Haven't heard of this one before - can someone point me to
some more info?

Cheers,
Andrew "Skippy" Martens