The weight in gold of obsolescence

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 ago. The original Sound Blaster 1.0. Who would have thought that I would now need an obscure chip from this board .. not talking about the YM3812 (OPL2) – but a SAA 1099 which would have been, I think very easy to add to chipsounds, especially when i could just compile a little C program in borland DOS compiler and make it scream from its ISA slot in my 486 for my now routine steps of noise pattern and bit mixing analysis.

Only two years ago I remember that place had a HUGE box of ISA audiocards, filled with valuable chiptune goodies on them (got about 15 boards with OPL3 chips on them, inducing the pretty rare Adlib Gold, and (even rarer) a Microsoft Windows SOUNDSYSTEM ... wait did you see that properly? Microsoft branded SOUND CARD!!!


But now all that is.... now nowhere to be found, “Went to Africa a long time ago!”.

...

The later shop owner gave me a odd look, and said -off the bat-, all that went to Germany a while ago (according to him the current biggest player in large-scale computer recycling) Why do we keep hearing about China all the time?... media fascination I guess.

I also Keep Wondering whether or not my obsession with “old junk” is (even remotely) an eco-statement, or if its just retarded geeky nostalgia. Whatever I buy will end up in recycling anyway.

So I have a look around, try to listen to all his stuff about bad customers and the provincial difference in police behavior in a merchant/client dispute.... I just kept obsessing about the damn cards.

Q"Are you SURE you don't have a dump with old ISA cards in them"
A"well each of them is worth 3$ in gold so you would need to give me more, like 5$ each"
Q"O...K... that's not really a problem"

Two stories higher (guy has LOADS of server/printer stuff)
found a container headed for recycling, which I spent 30 minutes digging through.
A bunch of them, mostly crappy Vibra 16 Sound Blasters, but nothing as old as an 8bit SB 1.0 card. However, here's what I scored:



Just couldn't resist its beauty. Also a Gravis GF1 chip is hard to come by, and may become handy in say chipsounds 5.0 ;)

But now with all the children suffering in this sad world, why do I imagine all those SID chips melting in Aqua Regia????

(anyone with a SB1.0 card that wants a free chipsounds license just send me a shout)
EDIT: I just won a rare CT1350A Stuffed with two SAA chips!

SIDs through the ages

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 world
Phillipines, 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 in one area or another due to age or power on/off cycle stress. (higher heat dissipation?)

Sometimes its missing voices, missing noises, filter nearly silent, etc.

I try to capture waveforms and run tests the best I can with them. I've got
a perfectly running 6581R4 AR that I baby everyday (not pictured here due to its ugly "blurred in white goo" look)

Pokeys under Limestone

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 fun. The third photo shows the desoldered Pokey chip, under the one I got NOS from a dealer (note the manufacturing dates - 5 years apart).

Next I placed the salvaged '87 pokey on my protoboard and played it the Ballblazer title track through it. Love those fat basses.

NOTE1, The ATARI 400/800 (home computer) has a native pokey chip, and the Ballblazer title sounds exactly (to my ears) as it does on the 7800 Cart, its logical to assume that the LucarFilm Games authors didn't want to alter their composition by only using 7800's native TIA chip... but did it justify adding a chip to the cart which would boost production costs a lot? if someone has some info on this i would be curious to know.

NOTE2, the other 7800 Game cart that contained a Pokey chip is Commando, but its not available in the cave.

That ____ VIC-I Noise Pattern

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

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?

Hi

Just 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

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.