Crystal's new chip

So a friend of mine has been playing with some of the newer
"Synthesizer-in-a-chip" line of IC's from crystal.

A week ago he was on their home page, or maybe it was email from a sales
guy, but they've recently announced a new chip that is very similar in power
to an AWE32 type of sound board.

The spec I saw included a full table look up that is stored in an "external"
ROM or DRAM. It does full attack/decay on each sound, includes special
effects (reverb etc) and a built in mixer. I think it said it could play 32
simultaneous sounds out of a library of over a hundred (depends on storage).
The wave table storage can be a 1meg (bytes) of compressed ROM. I think
they were asking $15 quantity 1, kind of prices. (Please correct me if
anyone has the time to visit the site, or maybe Joe knows off the top of his
head.)

So it seems to me with four or five chips you should be able to create a
universal sound/speech board for just about any game.

You'd need:
  - All in one, wavetable synthesizer chip.
  - Wave table ROM programmed with game sounds/voices.
  - PIC processor to do the interface stuff -- and some glue depending on game.
  - Serial DAC (available from Crystal).
  - Op amp filter/driver.

Optional:
  Audio power amp for the games that have this on the audio board.

Everything you need is there and there doesn't appear to be anything "to
work out". At this point it just looks like engineering (hook up the parts
on a board that can be plugged into the game, write the software, sample the
sounds, etc). It's not going to get much easier.

Any thoughts? (Especially you Joe, is this the IC you're using to derive the
one you been talking about, for your Cinematronics sound card?)

-Zonn
Received on Mon Jul 7 11:25:25 1997