First post, by LightStruk
- Rank
- Member
Do you ever wonder what might have happened if someone had put a sound chip from another computer or video game console onto an ISA sound card and launched it around the same time as the original Sound Blaster? For example, in the real world, Innovation put the Commodore's SID onto the SSI-2001.
There are two chips that come to mind for me - the Namco 163 and the SPC700 from the SNES / Super Famicom.
The Namco 163 first appeared on a Famicom cartridge in 1988. It is an 8-bit wavetable synth that supports up to 8 channels of audio. It's capable of some truly impressive music for a chip from 1988. (Most of the tracks in that link also utilize the square, triangle, and noise channels of the original NES, but you get the idea.) If it was cheap enough to put on a Famicom cartridge, then it would definitely have been cheap enough to put on an ISA sound card!
The SPC700 does not need an introduction for most folks, given how popular the SNES and Super Famicom continue to be. The SPC700 was first released with the Super Famicom in late 1990. It is a 16-bit wavetable synth that supports up to 8 channels of audio, and handles PCM digital sound playback as well. Unlike most sound chips of the day, the SPC700 is in reality a specialized 6502 CPU + DSP combination with a small amount of its own RAM. It meant that programmers could upload a song to its memory, send the play command, and then the music would play without any more intervention from the main CPU. The Super Famicom cost as much all together as a typical PC sound card did alone, so assuming Sony would have been willing to sell the SPC700 to anyone other than Nintendo, it would have been a very compelling sound card at a reasonable price in 1990!
Compared to the original Adlib which came out in 1987, the Namco 163 would have blown it away. Not that I have the time to try writing one, but it's easy to imagine a limited MIDI driver (only 8 note polyphony) for it under Windows with some sound samples baked into it. To be fair, the OPL2 can only do 9-note polyphony. The SPC700 could have beaten the Gravis Ultrasound (1992) to market by a year or more, although the GUS was more capable with 32 simultaneous channels.
What other chips could have or should have been made into PC sound cards?