[sdiy] Anyone ever use an AY3-8910?

[Andre Majorel]

On 2006-02-26 19:17 -0700, Eric Brombaugh wrote:

> Years ago (must have been early 80's) I wired up a General Instruments 
> AY3-8910 Programmable Sound Generator to my OSI Superboard and made all 
> kinds of odd sound effects. It was a cute chip - not as much analog 
> stuff as the Commodore SID - no filters, just a bunch of DCOs, Envelope 
> Gens and a PRN noise source and mixer. Here's a link to a datasheet:
> 
> http://users.rcn.com/carlott/ay3-8910.pdf
> 
> I just found that old circuit in my junkbox. I wonder if there's an 
> application here...

You could sell it to someone who has an Oric, Atari ST, Spectrum,
or one of a million arcade game boards to repair.

Or you could build a system around it. With careful programming,
you can get rather crunchy drum sounds out of it or even 4-bit
exponential law PCM (16 volume levels). Back in the eighties,
that's what I used for a drum machine :

  http://www.teaser.fr/~amajorel/oric/oric_dt.ogg
  http://www.teaser.fr/~amajorel/oric/oric_james.ogg

But it'll probably be simpler to emulate the thing in software.
It's not a hard chip to emulate since it's digital. MAME, Euphoric
and other emulators have C implementations of the 8910/8192.

-- 
André Majorel <amajorel at teaser.fr>
http://www.teaser.fr/~amajorel/