AY8930 sourced!

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 future addition to chipsounds.

As far as the interwebs are concerned it only has been used in one PC card (Covox Sound Master+) and one game (Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego). So my job will be to hack dosbox into spewing the register writes it sends to this chip and I'll make a render using my board (the usual stuff).

Since I have now too many AY8930's to care, if you are interested in upgrading your MSX, ST or whatever (untested), this might be your chance, since I will put a few of these rare babies on sale after they are tested.

JAMMA Space Invaders experiment.

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 controls are all mapped.

-The video is now RGBS (same signal send to R, G and B, and sync tapped from somewhere else.

-The only thing that doesn't follow the JAMMA spec is the audio output, since my mod requires a separate amp (like many other games like all Nintendo stuff and Mr.DO), so its obvious that any collector has those already. The SI daughterboard requires raw 18V+center tap directly from the transformer which I don't have (using a standard PC psu here)

-Game now uses one 27128 EPROM and not 4 to 8 separate 2716 (9316B or whatever)

-No color overlays .. duh!

Arcade Restoration - Week1: Acquisition

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.