RE: Anyone know...

> Well, interesting enough, when the game Tetris came out there was a
> BIG
> run on POKEY chips, distributor that I know was buying up all the
> POKEYs
> they could find. Now a little later would come a clone Tetris with
> Atari
> POKEY chips on them. Curious... However where this is leading to is I
> have a couple of TETRIS clones that do NOT use POKEYs. They use a 8748
> micro! Now the qestion is, what about that? Is the Pokey nothing more
> than an interestingly mapped 8748 family CPU?
>
For purposes of most video games, the POKEY is really just a kind-of
so-so square-wave synthesizer. There's a noise gate and some pretty
interesting distortion-type sounds you can make with it (that are tricky
to emulate), but you could get some basic POKEY clone behavior with most
any microcontroller. It's probably much easier if the game is only
using "pure" tones since those are simple enough to create in software.
POKEYs also have a random number generator, and some keyscanning and
potentiometer reading capabilities. (pots+keys=POKEY)

It'd be interesting to see if that 8748 had the security bit set-- if it
wasn't, the code might make for a fun read-through...

-Ckay
Received on Tue Aug 25 10:24:38 1998