Crystal's old chip...well maybe

My friend did some more looking into the Crystal synth chip with external
RAM, and was told by a distributer that, that chip had been discontinued and
replaced with their new all-in-one-chip the CS9236. Which is too bad since
the CS9236 has no capability of recording samples, or playing back from
external ROM.

The chip I was originally referring to was the CS9233, the only thing we've
ever found on it is at: www.cirrus.com/prodtech/ov.crystal/cs9233.html

It could be the distributor doesn't know what he's talking about, but then
again the newer chip does have a higher part number, is easier to use, and
is a 1 chip solution as opposed to three. Damn.

So the search continued and we found a similar, if not better for this
project, IC being made by ENSONIQ. In the 80's they were "the" sampling
synthesizer company. I remember there first keyboard blowing away the
Roland of the time, and also undercutting it by half in price.

Their "OTTO" chip is described at: www.ensoniq.com/html/otto.htm

They sell a sound card that uses this chip for $75 (including shipping).
The card contains an on board 68EC000 with an operating system that can be
"upgraded" (EEPROM?).

If programming information could be had for the OTTO, then this $75 card
contains everything needed for the universal sound card. 1 meg of sampling
RAM using compression. All the DSP for volume enveloping. 32 independent
voices with complete control over looping, etc. And it only took them
80,000 transistors to do it (according to the blurb). Anyone up for the
"agonies" of programming a 68000? ;^)

Even if no information can be found for the OTTO, if the card itself could
be run "stand alone", then this is still the universal sound card. I
believe this sound card runs a version of the standard Ensoniq operating
system. Ensoniq has always made downloading of new sounds available through
the MIDI exclusive commands (they documented their format while Roland was
calling there's proprietary. Guess who sold more synthesizers? Hee! hee!
-- come on manufacturers, get a clue.)

So sounds could be downloaded to the card through the MIDI interface, then
played the same way, using the MIDI interface. All using a very well
defined standard!

Of course this is true for most any sampling synthesizer nowadays. So maybe
the universal sound card is nothing but a PIC processor that converts the
game logic request to the proper MIDI notes to be used on any sampling
synthesizer?

With the price of used 486 motherboards going for less than $50 at swap
meets, that's $125 for a full sampling universal sound card (well less the
very minimal RAM and floppy/harddisk/romdrive, needed to bring it up --
yeah, were will I *ever* find an old floppy disk, or hard drive for that
matter.). Those baby AT boards would not take up much room inside the game
cabinet, being smaller than many of the sound cards in there now.

As long as a sound card / synthesizer supports the MIDI interface, the only
thing that would need changing (on the PIC side of things), to support
multiple synthesizers, would be the format of the .WAV files during
download. It's been a few years (ok quite a few) since I've looked into it,
but at one time there was talk of even standardizing these!

-Zonn
Received on Tue Jul 8 10:17:00 1997