Simple DIY Electronic Music Projects

I’ve spent some more time looking at how the AY sound driver used by Tim Follin for the ZX Spectrum works and one thing I always wanted to do was to see if I could get it up and running on my RC2014 just so that, well, I’m not sure, but why not?

This continues my series looking at hardware emulation of the AY-3-8912/8910: Part 1: Introduces the AVR-AY projects and available boards and how they go about using an AVR microcontroller, usually an ATMega48, to emulate an AY-3-8910 device.

Having explored how an AVR can be used to emulate the AY-3-8912/8910 in AY-3-8912/8910 Hardware Emulation I wanted to have a go at using the very common ATMega328P to do the same.

Here are the build notes for my PGA2350 Breakout PCB Design.

I’m wanting to do some experimenting with the Pimoroni PGA2350 which is a really neat, 25x25mm, RP2350 board with all 48 GPIO pins of the larger RP2350B bought out to two rows arranged in a square.

The 40-pin AY-3-8910 devices I’ve been playing with are no longer newly available, but they are pretty available if you are happy with a certain questionable quality (more on that here: Arduino and AY-3-8910).

Last year I programmed up an Arduino with my Pi Day MIDI Sequencer to play a short extract from Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach.

I’ve spent a bit of time looking at the “Tester” part of the AY driver code for Tim Follin’s music archive that I talked about in Z80 and AY-3-8910.

When I first heard about the Microrack concept, I was still playing around with my own Educational DIY Synth Thing so naturally I was really interested in seeing what it would be about.

Over on my other blog, I spentt a fair bit of time looking at the TD4 4-bit CPU.