Using the Soundgin with the 6502.

[smsavage32]

Has anyone here attached a Soundgin to the 6502?

[BigDumbDinosaur]

What is a “Soundgin?”

[barrym95838]

Did your search engine get lost somewhere in the Cretaceous period, BDD? I got many hundreds of solid leads in a couple of seconds.

I am not much of a hardware guy, but it looks like a 2.0 to 5.0V, 2400 to 9600 baud serial connection is about all that is needed. The software side could involve a significant effort, unless there's some prior art, and that's what I imagine the OP is hinting at.

[drogon]

smsavage32 wrote:

Has anyone here attached a Soundgin to the 6502?

Welcome on-board!

Back in the early 80's I had a ROM for my BBC Micro called Speech! (with the !) which did the allophone thing with some smart-ish (for the time) software to render text to speech in real-time using the Beebs on-board sound chip. Would I use one of your Soundgin chips in my Ruby 6502/816 system? Not sure - it needs too much analog "glue" for my liking (i'm also lazy in that respect) but given I have an ATmega 1280p already on-board then maybe a "soft" version is possible, although plan C is a plugin card for video, usb keyboard and that card would have more than enough oomph to act as a smart sound card too... Or a dedicated sound card? Interesting retro idea, but right now shipping stuff from the US is prohibitively expensive.

But one issue in these enlightened days - "just throw a raspberry Pi/Pico at it and be done" seems to be a very lazy solution to many things.

Cheers,

-Gordon
Ps. Hope your sales reps are on standby!

[commodorejohn]

In fairness, it's not that different from the plethora of "8-bit CPU driving a Propeller frontend" projects that were common in the mid-2010s, but yeah, it does kinda miss the romance of a more discrete hardware project.

Really, though, I'm more surprised by how functionally sparse the thing is. I know "8-bit chic" is in these days, but you couldn't slap a basic filter on there!?

[wayfarer]

looking it over, could someone do a comparison of it to the SID?
I saw a LOT of similarities.

[Sean]

As compared to the SID, this Soundgin also features multiple channels of sound synthesis based upon waves and ADSR. Soundgin has more channels - about twice as many as the SID, possibly with a bit more flexibility in mixing (not entirely clear without deeper dive). Soundgin also has some speech synthesis capability, which is not present in the SID. In terms of interfacing, it is completely different - SID sat on the main CPU bus, whereas interfacing with the Soundgin is via serial at 2400 or 9600 baud.