[sdiy] Re: Chip tunes

[David Anderson]

Hi Ian,

You've hit on a subject near and dear to my heart. There are a few 
options you might want to explore:

Commodore 64 sound chip (SID)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_SID

AY-3-8910/8912/8913/YM2149
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YM2149

Atari POKEY:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_POKEY

If you haven't seen it yet, the main chiptune entry in wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiptune

And definitely check out the MIDIBox work:
http://www.midibox.org/
http://www.ucapps.de/

The most work has been done with the SID, most of which is in the 
MIDIBox arena.

There's at least one person who's working with the POKEY to make a module:
http://skrasoft.com/blog/

And I've been working, on and off over the past few years, on the AY-3-8910.

You might also want to check out the Arduino; at the very least, there's 
a MIDI library (if the midibox stuff doesn't float your boat) that will 
make life a little easier:
http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Main/MIDILibrary

The Arduino builds on the Atmel AVR chips with a C-like programming 
environment. The advantage of the Arduino/AVR environment is that you'll 
need fewer support chips (vs the Z80).
http://www.arduino.cc/

Lots of cool stuff has been done with the Arduino. One of my favorites 
is the Meggy Jr (http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/meggyjr), 
which one person has turned into a sequencer that fires samples from 
another Arduino (tho it could be easily converted to trigger just about 
anything):
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/03/beat_sequencer_from_meggy_waveshiel.html

Sorry to go off-topic there but you've stumbled into a rich subculture :)

David