Sound chips: Original Chip Set, MOS Technology SID, Ensoniq AudioPCI, General Instrument AY-3-8910, POKEY, MOS Technology TED, Texas Instruments LPC Speech Chips, Konami SCC, Commodore AA+ Chipset, Amiga Advanced Architecture chipset

Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 38. Chapters: Original Chip Set, MOS Technology SID, Ensoniq AudioPCI, General Instrument AY-3-8910, POKEY, MOS Technology TED, Texas Instruments LPC Speech Chips, Konami SCC, Commodore AA+ Chipset, Amiga Advanced Architecture chipset, Amiga Hombre chipset, Digital Compression System, Yamaha YM2612, Texas Instruments SN76489, Sound chip, Yamaha YMF7xx, Nintendo S-SMP, Yamaha YM3812, MOS Technology VIC, Yamaha YMF278, Texas Instruments SN76477, Philips SAA 1099, Yamaha YM2608, Aureal Vortex, Yamaha YMF262, Yamaha YM2151, Yamaha YM2203, Ensoniq ES-5506 OTTO, Ricoh 2A03, Yamaha YM2413, Programmable sound generator, BSMT2000, Yamaha YM2610, Yamaha YM2164, Yamaha YM3016, Yamaha YM2414, Yamaha YM3526, Yamaha YM3014B, Yamaha YM3012, Ricoh RF5c68, OPTi 929, Texas Instruments SN76488. Excerpt: The MOS Technology 6581/8580 SID (Sound Interface Device) is the built-in Programmable Sound Generator chip of Commodore's CBM-II, Commodore 64, Commodore 128 and Commodore MAX Machine home computers. It was one of the first sound chips of its kind to be included in a home computer prior to the digital sound revolution. Together with the VIC-II graphics chip, the SID was instrumental in making the C64 the best selling computer in history, and is partly credited for initiating the demoscene. The SID has , which was filed on February 27, 1983, and issued on July 7, 1987. The patent expired on July 7, 2004. The SID was devised by engineer Robert "Bob" Yannes, who later co-founded the Ensoniq digital synthesizer company. Yannes headed a team that included himself, two technicians and a CAD operator, who designed and completed the chip in five months, in the latter half of 1981. Yannes was inspired by previous work in the synthesizer industry and was not impressed by the current state of computer sound chips. Instead, he wanted a high-quality instrument chip, which is the reason why the SID has features like the envelope generator, previously not found in home computer sound chips. I thought the sound chips on the market, including those in the Atari computers, were primitive and obviously had been designed by people who knew nothing about music. ¿ Robert Yannes, On the Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore Emphasis during chip design was on high-precision frequency control, and the SID was originally designed to have 32 independent voices, sharing a common oscillator. However these features could not be finished in time, so instead the mask work for a certain working oscillator was simply replicated three times across the chip surface, creating three voices with a unique oscillator for each voice. Another feature that was not incorporated in the final design was a frequency look-up table for the most common musical notes, a feature that was dropped because of