Plogue chipsounds

AY8930 Initial tests!

2011-12-22T11:54:00.000-08:00

Over concerns received about the possibility that the chips were fakes I decided to test a few of them right away (Paypal customer is always right no? I might just get my money back if they are fakes) So first thing I did was to place two of those chips on my Bagman arcade board, and the sound was just as one would expect a normal AY-3-8910 (the old version). So at least they are not broken

AY8930 sourced!

2011-12-20T08:34:00.000-08:00

The AY8930 Enhanced Programmable Sound Generator is a very rare Microchip (who bought GI) version of the AY-3-8910. It includes better frequency range, noise, PWM and independent control of the envelope for each channel. I was lucky to find a stash of those chips and will soon try them on my AY-3-8910/YM2149F protoboard to see if they work and experiment with them, then for a

JAMMA Space Invaders experiment.

2011-11-03T09:58:00.000-07:00

33 years ago a game caught the eyes (and ears) of many people in Japan, and later everywhere else. You can read the whole story here of course, but this is not the subject of this post. This post is about a little experiment I made in fixing and converting an original Midway Space Invaders motherboard to run in with JAMMA harness or standalone machine. A Few notes: -The coin input, and

Arcade Restoration - Week1: Acquisition

2011-10-14T02:38:00.000-07:00

Wednesday Max and I went on an econoline field trip to bring back two classic cabinets in fair condition. I will show our restoration progress in here as time permits. Work will progress slowly since this is really a pet/coding break/lunch break project for us.

Analog TV Death toll

2011-09-01T06:37:00.000-07:00

Its Analog TV Death Day in Canada and to celebrate here are a few personal observations. While I sadly don't have access to any sort of statistics, just going to work each day using my bicycle I got to see lots and LOTS of Analog TVs on the curb. NO thanks to the imps at BestShop for turning customers away from the standalone ATSC->composite converters and towards new LCDs instead. "You know

Playing the revolution/Home Computer Invasion Documentaries in Trouble???

2011-06-25T12:20:00.000-07:00

Original Link being gone, it makes me fear the worst. I REALLY hope the reason isn't because of damn lawyers! Here are two other sources for the Teasers on the most thrilling documentary series since The machine that Changed the World: There's never been a computer documentary this well shot EVER, and nearly everyone I respect and admire in the industry took time to get interviewed. I

(SAFE) US SMS Japanese Mod in action

2011-06-24T10:40:00.000-07:00

Charles MacDonald provided a circuit for me to try HERE Good news is that it now works after a few treaks. Just have to to a proper protoboard version now. I'll be receiving two different FM Units soon, the original and the "Australian Reproduction"

The reluctant US SMS that didnt want to be japanese

2011-06-06T18:46:00.000-07:00

EDIT2: A new solution (much more invovled ) was suggested by Charles MacDonald this will be interresting to try. EDIT: Nice, I got my answers in that thread. I'll have to backtrack on when did this become a dangerous thing to try, FYIW I used 10k res to short pin 34. This MOD does not work on my SMS: I tried everything, including burning a Japanese BIOS which works great here:

Does ... not ... compute...

2011-05-10T07:04:00.001-07:00

Added Internal Picture: Theres a piezo in there... now if I could make it beep..... Horrible damage due to the leaking internal soldered 2x1.5v AA batteries (removed)

The Great AdLib Fire ...

2011-05-03T17:58:00.000-07:00

(see third capacitor from bottom) ... I hate that smell. From wikipedia: "Self-destruction and thermal runawayTantalum capacitors are under some conditions prone to self-destruction by thermal runaway. The capacitor typically consists of a sintered tantalum sponge acting as the anode, a manganese dioxide cathode, and a dielectric layer of tantalum pentoxide created on the tantalum sponge

Lamer Exterminator, or how a 22 year old malware can still piss you off.

2011-02-19T12:03:00.000-08:00

As usual I need to step back for my obligatory back story. -VIC-20 from 1981 to 1985 -C64 from 1986 to 1994 (even logged onto my University account with it!) -Various PCs and Mac's from then on. Didn't see the word Amiga there? Normal, only very rich kids had them where I came from. Only relatively recently did I start to indulge in that world, and what a 'fun' ride this still is. Amiga

patience

2011-02-04T13:17:00.000-08:00

Oh yes I'm working on new stuff...

2010-12-23T11:48:00.000-08:00

No updates for a while, its because I can't disclose my new stuff yet. Sad because theres LOTS of research in there. I'm hoping to post a glimpse at NAMM 2011.

New research on the SID ADSR

2010-11-05T06:48:00.000-07:00

My previous post on the SID ADSR tables on the SID DIE left a question unanswered about the exact method by which the chip manages to apply the level changes in the envelopes at certain points in its decay/release stages. Lucky for us, Frank Wolf took upon the challenge, and I'm quite priviledge to be allowed to publish his research on this blog. So here is his analysis of that problem.... (

Plogue chipsounds running on VMachine Hardware

2010-10-12T16:31:00.000-07:00

Composite vs RGB (SNES)

2010-09-29T07:27:00.000-07:00

VIC-20 (CR)'s bad waveform clipping.

2010-09-10T08:42:00.000-07:00

Poor MOS6560, it could so much better outside a VIC-20! For chipsounds 1.0, I got the help of eslapion from the Denial forum to analyze the RC filter output of the VIC-20. Eslapion got me to learn how to understand the link between the resistors and capacitors and how to extract the exact low pass filter coefficients that was needed to implement in DSP. It simply turns out to be a 1.6Khz one

X marks the spot!

2010-08-21T06:25:00.000-07:00

People following my twitter might have been wondering what that Canadiana Road Trip stuff was a'boot yesterday. It was about salvaging a pile of 50 arcade boards from certain death. My Pirate Map pointed to a secret location near Ottawa, Ontario, so went, dug up, and found the treasure! (yes that's the trunk of MY CAR) A quick evaluation can be made to about 65 soundchips on these. (some

30 Minute JAMMA SuperGun Audio test

2010-08-06T19:34:00.000-07:00

I use MAME differently than you I'm pretty sure. You can sort games by name, company, date, but usually I sort entries by 'sound'. For a guy like me, its both salivating and dangerous... for my finances. There are a few sound chip gems that are only found on obscure PCBs. However, a side effect of the omnipresence of MAME is to somewhat lower the price on used game PCBs on Ebay. Why would

Curves

2010-07-21T10:38:00.001-07:00

teh curves.

ZIF socketed C64 for SID chip swap

2010-06-18T08:34:00.000-07:00

ZIF (Zero insertion force) sockets are a great way to reduce the wear on chip pins when you need to swap them often, which is as you've guessed what I need. A simple 28PIN ZIF socket like this: Can be used to quickly swap SIDs to run tests. Video:

Best registration plate ever

2010-06-04T11:55:00.000-07:00

Thats sadly not my car, can't have custom plates in Québec. Oh well.

I'll get you 1771!

2010-05-31T17:33:00.000-07:00

A full day spent figuring that chip's sound generation again. Recorded the two separate output pins in a multitude of ways, but there seems to be signal bleed whatever I try (even removing the chip and lifting one of the pins of its socket from the circuit) This is not your typical PSG.

uPD1771C noise puzzle

2010-05-28T11:09:00.000-07:00

LFSR feeding a delta-modulated logarithmic DAC??? Evil 80's reverse engineering protection??? Alien message?

.plan (audio version)

2010-05-26T12:15:00.000-07:00

Anyone old enough to remember what a .plan file is? I just got the idea of making a status update on what im working on, in audio form. These will not come with any explanations whatsoever. They might be current bugs, new features, tests or experiments from code im currently working on... Here's the second one. I'll twitter any updates to it as I go along (twitter.com/plgDavid)

The one page BASIC SID Benchmark.

2010-05-13T11:04:00.000-07:00

How do you make sure the SIDs you bought from Ebay are fully working before giving feedback? Or, you are the seller and you want to claim "100% fully working SID all voices. All Filters guaranteed!" and double check your stuff before you send the chips? How do you make sure the SIDs that are in the old C64 in your dad's basement works before attempting a MIDIBox SID, sammichSID or other similar

BLIP 2009 Presentation now online!

2010-04-19T07:37:00.000-07:00

Hi Here is the presentation I made at the 2009 edition of BLIP Festival, in Brooklyn New York last December. I've tried to squeeze as much info as possible in there, so it might be a challenge to follow especially considering I didnt have a microphone, so the camera just picked lots of ambiant noise (most of which has been DSP'ed out fwiw) Thanks a lot for Max Deland for the video editing, and

Next Bidule version has something special....

2010-04-01T11:18:00.001-07:00

You will be able to reproduce pretty much any type of LFSR based noises and tones. From simple Atari TIA tones to the more complex Noise waveform of the SID, as documented by Marko Makela and Asger Alstrup, in an interactive way.

SID waveform captures

2010-03-26T13:10:00.001-07:00

Well well well, I knew that the 6581 and the 8580/6582 generated different combined waveforms, but I didn't know that not only each single chip generates slightly different bits from each other, but you also wont get twice the exact same waveform on two separate playbacks on a single chip. This is a binary diff of two OSC3 sampling runs of a combined waveform on a 6581 CBM (r3) chip: Thanks

SID 6581R3 ADSR tables, up close.

2010-03-15T08:28:00.000-07:00

In the center of any SID emulation there is the bare waveform generation, and a very accurate explanation of how the this works internally has been published through an interview with its creator, which can be read here. Fascinating read for any geek head! However some very important details are missing, including the exact maths behind the main ADSR clocking but also its pseudo exponential

MESS 0.137 is out!

2010-03-14T16:40:00.000-07:00

Hi I'm proud to announce my little personal contribution to the best emulator project in the world. Since a bit after chipsounds 1.0 was released, I started contributing some of my recent research to the open source 'MESS' project on the sound front. My contributions are "without strings attached" as I feel that the research in MAME/MESS is crucial to the good preservation of the history of

The SID's non-monotonic DAC

2010-02-25T12:50:00.000-08:00

That picture is from a 6581R4AR. A Simple ADSR glide on a 50/50 Pulse set at highest freq. This is going to be fun to emulate.... http://masteringelectronicsdesign.com/an-adc-and-dac-differential-non-linearity-dnl/

Ultimate 2532(or 2352) PROM MegaCart!!! ... kinda

2010-02-01T07:11:00.000-08:00

While visiting my favorite local Electronics Surplus Store I came across this odd 24 pin fake IC to IC cable, which gave me a cool idea. One very common (and boring) tasks in my line of work is doing adapters to run ROMs (custom and whatnot) on the real hardware for analysis. This setup makes it pretty easy (and solderless) to try stuff around, especially difference in CPU<->BUS<->ROM

That big mysterious gate array

2010-01-21T10:11:00.000-08:00

Analyse.. don't Destroy (a Casio PV-1000)

2010-01-17T16:02:00.000-08:00

I'm not a console collector nut, I'm a audio chip collector nut. There are countless game consoles and computers out there that I dont care much about because they all contain the same chips. (AY-3-8910 is nice, but you can only have so many of them). What I'm looking to acquire at this point are the most obscure ones which contain custom/unique sound generating chips. You've heard about the

Meet my new friend the logic analyser!

2010-01-09T09:19:00.000-08:00

Its time to step my game up. So I've decided to acquire the immese value for money Saleae Logic Analyser. This baby will allow me to analyse and record a bunch of stuff that really cant be handled with a sound card and an oscilloscope alone. (namely serial digital audio prior to being sent to DACs) As a test to see if everything works, and that i can get sufficient time resolution on this, ive

These are not the chips you're looking for

2009-11-30T16:42:00.000-08:00

[EDIT dec7th 2009] the wikipedia page has been corrected!Thanks! According to wikipedia there is a VRC6 chip inside a North American Nigel Mansell "World Challenge" cartridge. Well no, there isn't. And there's no such thing as "World Challenge" either, only "World Championship" same difference. Looks like Ill have to dig up the big bucks for a Japanese Castlevania 3 cart.

TED: The 100$ noise pattern

2009-11-09T11:51:00.000-08:00

00000000110010000100010111111101010011100 11000111111000001011010101101111101111000 10000001001111001110110011111001011101011 00101011110100011000010100000111000110101 11000011110110110100001101110111001001000 11101001100110100100110110001010101000100 101001011 (low frequency version: audio) Working C16's and plus/4 are HARD to come by, and people need to pay the price for a working MOS8501

Full AY emu prototype

2009-10-28T12:37:00.000-07:00

Well I've talked about this before, but I'll say it again.Designing a synthesizer that claims full chip authenticity and playability at the same time is the toughest challenge I'm faced with.It hard to give access to powerful sound tweaking possibilities available on some chips when the synth paradigm you are basing your whole design on is of the standard[voice0 + voice1 + voice2 + (...) + voiceN

How I recorded and decoded POKEY's polynomial counters;Open Pokey Recipe for the curious

2009-10-17T06:41:00.000-07:00

HelloThis is a "reprint" of the comments inside "POKEY.sfz", the chipsounds POKEY configuration file. (the original date is March 2009) ******************************************************************************Was I naive to think that POKEY was just "another TIA", and I spent enough evenings to regret it. Making the breadboard and having Pokey spew some tones was the easy part, but soon

Last minute addition: Odyssey 2 (P824x) VDC chip!

2009-10-01T06:19:00.000-07:00

Building a software product and analyzing hardware are two very important facets of a product like chipsounds. Do mostly the analysis and you have a very techy app that no one understands, do only the former and you miss that that hands on feeling and the smell of printed circuit boards.So this weekend I took a little break from coding (which is very close to done anyway) And looked at the few

VIC-20 MIDI Interface and Synth Cartridge Prototype

2009-09-30T10:21:00.000-07:00

The VIC-20 was my first computer. You can imagine how close and personal I am with the thing. I do feel that its been unjustly historically overshadowed by the computer that followed it, especially in the audio/music scene.Viznut and PwP's Robotic Liberation was a real blast and it probably revitalized the scene a bit.But what we need is a musician friendly way to tackle the beast!Three years or

New screenshots on official site

2009-09-25T15:21:00.000-07:00

Its getting VERY VERY close to shipping now.I just build release candidate 1 with the first bunch of presets.New screen shots and a new "preset-show-off" excuse for a track from myself onthe official chipsounds page

Kudos to my testers

2009-09-21T17:10:00.000-07:00

HiWe are quite lucky to have some of you testing this thing.You know who you are and you will be credited :)Thanks again!

chipsounds on TV

2009-09-11T15:16:00.001-07:00

Just prepping to relax and to watch a tv show whose music (by Éric Patenaude of Plogue), contains quite a few blips from your favorite in-dev synth :)Listen to the intro and spot the blips!LINKEt Félicitations encore à toi Éric!

The kind of screenshot I fancy

2009-08-28T07:58:00.000-07:00

I rechecked my DMG waveform synthesis yesterday, and made sure I had the range and AC Coupling emulation right according to the lowest 32Hz freq of the DMG Wave Channel.(i dont have a pro mod DMG, I personnaly like the sound of the phones out of mine)EDIT: For fairness to the scientific community, here are the actual samples.1)chipsounds2)DMG phone outSlight tonal difference, but as herr_prof

No fancy research, just preset making

2009-08-19T18:42:00.000-07:00

But presets can take a while, there's just so much messing around associated with the task.This is one of my favorite SID style arps

Testing the Wave Sequencer module

2009-08-14T12:02:00.000-07:00

Paul Slocum's amazing ATARI synthcart beats remixed in chipsounds... (just random pitchbend/mod wheel action on the first loop)

uPD1771C Tester App

2009-08-06T17:50:00.000-07:00

Hum and I thought my POKEY sounded abrasive...Until ThisMaking this app (in a non-existing assembler) was such a pain, it was better be worth it. This is "one sound". Most definitely some AND/OR'ing of two bit patterns. Research goes on... yummy!

ROM Trojaning the Super Cassette Vision

2009-07-30T17:47:00.000-07:00

Hi. Each time I do something geeky I tell myself "now THIS is THE most geeky thing I did in my life". But whatever happens, this is a phrase I tell myself month after month working on chipsounds.... Which brings us to the wonderful topic of ROM Trojaning! But nah, lets put things in context first. :) The idea behind chipsounds is not to put in VSTi form what people have been doing with

A new format to log them all.

2009-07-10T07:57:00.000-07:00

While doing my Chip research I stumbled upon many different formats to store “chip music information”.Some of them contain the full assembly code used by the original console/video game -SID (C64 6510 assembly)-NSF (NES)-SAP (Atari 8bit computers with POKEY chips in them)(etc)Others only contained the actual register values WRITES along with their timestamps:-VGM (SN, YM2612, YM2151 etc) Both

Second Demo track, this time its from Chupathingy

2009-07-04T08:16:00.000-07:00

LINK

First demo track

2009-06-19T08:01:00.000-07:00

HiHere's a short track made by Eric using the current beta of chipsounds.

While im on the C64 front: Heres one for the Museums

2009-06-17T07:12:00.000-07:00

(sorry for the old photo)better pictures of the cart in this Auction{EDIT} I just dumped the contained eprom (which works in Vice), including PCB pictures HERE. HOWEVER. Unless someones emulates the onboard ACIA and PIA chips in a Vice addon, this is really just an exercise in digital archeology.more info: http://www.prophet64-forum.com/viewtopic.php?id=460http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/

SID filter emulation ... perhaps a _tad_ bit too extreme.

2009-06-16T17:06:00.000-07:00

Extremely distorted 6581 filter running a combined Waveform arpeggio. Yes I know this is not strictly accurate but its a fun diversion while i tune it.

Another chip in the wall

2009-06-12T19:13:00.000-07:00

pain. MPT-03 mess. pattern recording success. no brain left to explain.

Evolution of sucking

2009-06-10T07:45:00.001-07:00

Choice to desolder chips:1)5$ (and millions of curses)2)20$ (less curses but a lot of frustration)3)200$ (And worth every penny.)

CMS (Dual Philips SAA 1099) Recordings

2009-05-30T09:05:00.000-07:00

Here's a rarity, carefully sampled for you.Before the soundblaster, there was the Creative Music System (CMS) (AKA GameBlaster), which contained two Philips SAA 1099 chips. It pretty much bombed since the OPL2/Adlib was all the rage at that point.Nevertheless, the thing has some charm. Here are two recordings made on a SB 2.0 CT1350A (with the SAA chips factory installed as legacy option)

8 hours of (why would I buy a flash cart?) later

2009-05-29T09:02:00.001-07:00

Cart:ROM Test:Note1: this is a bare cart with no battery backup or mapper. Will only run 256 kBit /32KB roms ... which is more than I need for my tests.Note2: the quote should read please dont _PUT_ your wires in my brain.

Total Stereo separation ATARI 2600 Jr Mod

2009-05-24T07:16:00.000-07:00

There are various NTSC 2600 RCA A/V mods out there. Four years ago (note WAAAAAY before I thought of making chipsounds) there were a only a few that I didn't really like since either the mod was mono, or stereo but with huge L+R bleed that didn't really cut it for me.Four years ago, I also had about zero electronics knowledge, so I hacked the most horrible thing which you can see here:Instead of

We had Joy we had fun, We had EPROMs in the sun.

2009-05-15T06:32:00.001-07:00

Yes, am all aware that there are proper tools to do this "professionally". But this is way cooler. One and a half day suffice to erase them to 0xFF's. Way faster than it used to be in the 70's? (debatable), but I otherwise DO miss the ozone layer.NOTE from this site"UV-C radiation, which is lethal, is emitted at wavelengths of 200-280 nm. Fortunately, UV-C is completely absorbed by atmospheric

The weight in gold of obsolescence

2009-05-09T18:36:00.000-07:00

Gold price is currently 900 USD an ounce. It is one of the only safe investing bets for the current economy... However that's bad news for you and me.Last Friday I took off early and indulged in some long overdue electronic junk treasure hunt. Visited two of my best spots in Montreal pcrecycle and 1800parts.Whats funny in fact is that I was looking for a device I had myself thrown away 10 years

SIDs through the ages

2009-04-27T06:20:00.000-07:00

Here is a glimpse of some of my collected chips.While the first one on this picture is dated 83, ive seen a few 1982 ones.(i must have got one somewhere, probably broken in a bin :)So they span roughly 10 years in production, in various places in the worldPhillipines, Korea, Hong Kong.Its hard to find perfectly good working pre-8580 SID chips, as the vast majority of them all seem to have defects

Pokeys under Limestone

2009-04-14T06:15:00.000-07:00

Few people know that there are literally thousands of Pokey Chips stored in a limestone cave somewhere in Kansas City. A liquidation company bought truckloads of mint unopened ATARI carts, and among these is the ATARI 7800 version of Ballblazer. While I didn't feel like ripping apart a perfectly good mint unopened box, I nevertheless scourged through my cartridge collection and opened mine for

That ____ VIC-I Noise Pattern

2009-04-07T12:22:00.001-07:00

My VIC emulation just gave me a good scare yesterday as I suddenly realized I might have overlooked a crucial detail. Time to get the offwhite box out again and sniff the audio pin's output for something....OK! I'm convinced my Emulation was right... oh well... better triple check everything

New Acquisition

2009-04-04T12:22:00.001-07:00

Just received my latest toy. A PAL Soundic MPT-03 Console (Clone of an Emerson Arcadia 2001 ) And just inside, a socketed Ceramic Signetics UVI 2637 ... Already got the 9Bit noise pattern from it (and surprise its the SAME as TIA Distortion 8!). But some games generate odd mixed patterns that i'll surely be investigating in the future.

Bug or Feature?

2009-03-30T12:57:00.000-07:00

HiJust having some fun with my dev build of chipsounds trying out my new Pokey oscillator code. Here we have the eternal programmer question...Is THIS SOUND a bug or a FEATURE?Safe to say, chipsounds will contain some extra "note quite accurate" fake-chips in there.

3 Brothers

2009-03-22T07:25:00.000-07:00

What do you do when you want to lower your stress level? Solder of course :)I wanted to free my breadboards and "stabilise" my test suite against hardware, so i spent a few hours doing those two new boards.

Pokey Trials

2009-03-12T08:08:00.000-07:00

Here's a photo of my current breadboard for my Pokey. Just missing a clock divider hooked to my 3.57Mhz crystal to get the desired 1.79Mhz. (doing alright with a 2.0 MHz one at the moment for diagnostics).Pokey is odd, really. and a challenge to integrate in my current Synthesizer code. All bit patterns (or distortions) vary across frequencies and even sometimes retriggering. This seems to be

Small update

2009-02-28T08:15:00.000-08:00

Sync Buzzer is DONE! ...Good thing is that new oscillator code opens the door to tons of other cool new sounds... but you will just have to wait until the demos are out!!!

More AY-3-8910 and YM2149F hacking

2009-02-14T10:33:00.000-08:00

One of the last oscillator code bits I need to do is to replicate the Envelope buzzer (and Sync Buzzer) techniques used on those chips.So again, like with all facets of this project, i just HAD to get my hands dirty!I used a bread board to experiment (left), and then made a protoboard(right) that proves a bit less flaky than the original. (and well i needed my breadboards for some other stuff)

One by One ... SN76489AN

2009-01-12T15:57:00.001-08:00

The SN76489AN is a very basic chip, probably second to the VIC-I. Even though the AY-3-8910 is a tad bit more complex (the envelopes), in many places you will read both the SN and the AY described as "PSG"s or programmable sound generator.Basic 50% duty cycle square"1/15" duty "cyclic noise, (rarely used)32767 bit long Noise pattern. (different on chip variations)I was lucky to discover that

2009-01-12T15:50:00.000-08:00

Just a little site to collect my findings and describe my experiments in developing this product.Already 3 years of work have passed since I started this and first time I actually write about it.The reason is, well one is always afraid of doing some work for nothing, especially when the concept is pretty bold... to make the Chip Tune VSTi to cover them all.NAMM 2009 is in two days.Still things to