First post, by carlostex
- Rank
- l33t
I believe the Reverse Engineering of the Innovation SSI-2001 was a great success. We've seen 2 of these projects recently. Replication of the the Innovation SSI-2001 took a little bit of time, mostly due to these cards being extremely rare. But three years later, there is now a very reliable PCB design that allows Innovation SSI-2001 capatibility.
Project MPU is another successful story. The project itself was quite simple, much simpler than the Innovation, because the MIF-IPC-A is a much simpler design, glue logic only. Nevertheless, it was quite successful.
I can only imagine that replicating a Covox Sound Master would be even more difficult. I can't even find a good quality picture of the card online. Then the availability seems to be non-existant.Anyone on Vogons or Vintage Computer Forums that owns an original Covox Sound Master?
Then the parts availability.The main component was the General Instrument AY-3-8930 sound generator. This was an enhanced version of the venerable AY-3-8910 that was part of computers like the Atari ST. Searching eBay, AY-3-8910 seems to be available in high enough numbers but the 8930 seems to be non-existent. The card had dual DB9 game ports. This is a not very important feature in my opinion.
Against the Innovation the Covox Sound Master has advantages. It did have an 8bit DAC, probably not more complicated than a speech thing really. A second advantage is game support. At least around 100 games support the Sound Master.
I guess the first step, and maybe the most difficult is to find an actual card. Cloudschatze has been looking for one and as far as i know he hasn't had any luck.