Re: SFX Expander programming and VICE

On Sun, Nov 27, 2011 at 06:12:51AM +0000, Richard Atkinson wrote:
> On Nov 26 2011, Gábor Lénárt wrote:
> 
> >Does anybody want to donate a 3812 equipped sound expander
> >cartridge for me?
> >:) :) :)
> 
> I'm not aware of any YM3812 equipped Sound Expanders other than my
> own. The device comes with a YM3526 OPL. I've met the designer of
> this cartridge; she lives not far from me in Cambridge, UK. Back in
> 1999 I desoldered the YM3526 from my Sound Expander and the YM3812
> OPL2 from an Adlib clone, and installed the YM3812 in a 24 pin IC
> socket in my Sound Expander. It ran all the standard software just
> the same as before and since then I've experimented with the extra
> waveforms the OPL2 adds.

Ahaa. Honestly my plan with this player based on the idea, that many C64
cartridges are quite hard to get and/or expensive while you can have many
spare old ISA cards at home for free ... So what a wasting to buy things
instead of old stuffs your wife would like to threw away :)

I've decided to try to use some ISA cards with C64 first, beginning with a
really simple one: an 8 bit ISA AdLib card (yes, I also read Ruud's site
about this ISA/C64 plans, but for me that curcuit is far too complex to
build since I don't have enough experience in this topic yet): it is simple
to program, etc. Then I found this info:

http://www.raphnet.net/electronique/adlib/adlib_en.php

It's an AdLib connected to the paralell port of a PC. So I thought this is
easy to adopt for a C64 too. And only after this I've realized there is
something similar already: the SFX Sound Expander for C64 which is already
emulated by VICE (not so working for me it turned out though ...).

Anyway now I think, it would be not so hard to build some SFX Expander
compatible stuff (not the kbd itself, just the YM chip related part), using
an AdLib card, and it would give the possibility for everyone to have
a compatible "cartridge" in a quite cheap way, if someone already has
an AdLib card (or a SoundBlaster btw: 8 bit SB cards have the OPL2 chip as
well, some I/O etc, even some digital audio playback is possible then
as extra though DMA etc would not be implemented, just the register based
I/O and that's all)


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