CMS (Dual Philips SAA 1099) Recordings

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)

Doodle
Loom

More can be found here

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

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

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 feeding the same voltage source to both channels, like in that schematic, I modded it by added TWO 7805's onto an external duck-taped protoboard onto the console itself.
Each of them "feeding" DC component into one of the two TIA audio outputs.
As always I try to bypass AC coupled electrolytic caps - however dangerous this is - to tap in closer to the original signal as possible (in hindsight I should have buffered the signals as well with an opamp).
However ugly it is, it works perfectly for my own taste.

Whats cool about stereo mods? Well to completely isolate effects used by programmers, remember that two channels is not much.

Pacman's horrible intro "tune"
ET's Landing

Notice the TOTAL absence of Background noise. (mp3 encoding did the worst)

Note#2: The Atari Cartridge PCB is from Pixels Past. Build to use 27128 EPROMS (see previous). So fun code can be easily ran and recorded. Dont worry I do have original game carts for Pacman and ET . Like who doesnt.

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

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 ozone and oxygen. Even with severe ozone reduction, UV-C radiation would still be absorbed by the remaining ozone."

EPROMs require UV-C's (according to wikipedia) ... hum .. anyway, 1.5 day to wipe my 27128's is an actual observation.
I have got 20 or so 271282's (salvaged from an arcade board), so this erasing delay is a non issue for my Console/Cartridge development.

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.