[Coco] CC-Five (was Re: Pseudo CoCo4???) (LONG)

[Mark McDougall]

jdaggett at gate.net wrote:

> Now the Speech/Sound card module is a different critter. Unlike the
> Orchestrra 90 card, which the main micro runs code from, the
> speech/sound card has its own dedicated processor,  TMS7040. Along
> with that is its own ram. The heart of the sound is the AY3-8913
> sound chip, and the SP0256-ALS speech chip. I do believe there is a
> HDL version of the sound chip available that maybe open source. The
> speech chip may still be floating around in surplus markets.

My colleague here has implemented the AY-3-8910 for our PACE project. It
was reasonably trivial, if not a little resource-hungry. I understand
that the 8913 is basically just 3x 8910 cores in one chip?!?

I'd suspect that the SP0256-ALS isn't very difficult to emulate - AFAIK
those speech chips where just wave tables...

> The TI micro is a 4 bit micro that is now obsolete. That along with
> the sppech chip would be the hardest to reproduce. SO that kind of
> forces backward compatiblilty with the current cards.

That's a different kettle of fish, but still within the realm of
possibility, I think. I'd love to do my own cut of a processor, for
example, and maybe this 4-bit micro is a good candidate??? :)

Regards,
Mark