Re: Crystal's old chip...well maybe

>After looking again at Ensoniq web page it looks like, late last night, I
>misread the specs. This card has only ROM table capabilities, no RAM. The
>only way to use this card would be through reprogramming of the on board
>68000 "operating system" Or at least reprogramming the ROM to use our own
>"voices", if the format could be determined, that would be the way to go.

FWIW, there are Ensoniq sound chips on the Information Technologies arcade
game boards. (Time Killers, some sports games, etc.) They used about
1Mbyte of external EPROM for storing samples. At anyrate, I kept the
sample EPROMs from a few of these to pick apart. Want a copy of the ROMs?
It's probably either raw samples or maybe some form of ADPCM. (The
musician types tend to frown on anything that's lossy compression, so the
sample formats are usually something simple that can "decompress" in
realtime with no loss or big buffers needed...)

>I still like the game to MIDI interface using a very simple PIC design. We
>just need to find a sound card (Gravis Ultra sound maybe?) or low end
>synthesizer (maybe Ensoniqs has something?) that can accept samples through
>the MIDI interface. Or even back to the cheap-o mother board and Gravis
>Ultra sound idea, using a standard serial interface.

Ensoniq had a few "low-end" samplers a while back, but they still go for
pretty reasonable amounts of money (few hundred at least). I have a Mirage
DSK (Digital Sampling Keyboard, for you trivia fans)-- cool box. A
whopping 64K of sample memory! The whole thing was run off a 6809. The OS
was loaded from floppy, so a couple companies did replacement OS's that
turned the box into an additive synthesis keyboard instead of a sampler,
etc. Pretty neat architecture. I don't know if they're still around, but
there was a (nice) user's group magazine called "Transonic Hacker" that had
all sorts of info on all the Ensoniq line. (They still make some
super-nice gear now, although the last one I used was probably the EPS or
maybe the SQ-1.)

The old Mirage DSK formats were 8bit raw samples, with 8 bit envelope
control and digital filters on the outputs. (Described by some data bytes
at the beginning of the sample data.) I wrote a couple sample
converter/editors back when on the Atari ST. (I could track-read and write
the Mirage DSK disks in a single-sided ST drive to edit the raw data...)

What was the name of Ensoniq's "pro-sumer" PC audio card?

-Clay

Clayton N. Cowgill Engineering Manager
_______________________________________________________________________
/\ Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc. clay@supra.com
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Received on Tue Jul 8 11:08:29 1997