Posted By
Frederick
on 2018-04-06
12:40:00
|  Re: Modern sound chip for the Plus/4?
If newer hardware is a possibility then someone might want to look into the Propeller microcontroller from Parallax. It's a 40-pin DIP microcontroller that has eight separate cores you can program to perform different tasks concurrently, and it has found its way into more than a few retro-inspired builds as a substitute for an FPGA or CPLD (for example, the Propeddle project). People have written emulators for the SID and AY/YM chips along with some others, as well as some totally new audio implementations that are pretty impressive.
There's a representative list of audio projects at http://obex.parallax.com/projects/speech-sound that might give you some idea of what the chip can do (look at SidCog and AYCog as places to start). There's also some online forums at Parallax that have some really neat stuff but it's not very easy to find anything there. I'd post more but I don't want to take over the conversation, and also the forum thinks I'm a spammer if I add too many links.
(Something like that might also open up the possibility for a low-cost multimedia module for the Plus/4 series, as the Propeller also has onboard circuitry for composite video generation and there are sprite-based graphics drivers written for the Propeller using the cores to render video scanlines. I had thought about trying to build such a thing as a hobby project but I don't own a Plus/4 at this time, and I also have a nomadic lifestyle that prevents me from collecting more old electronics at the moment.)
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