Turning the ultimate 80s gaming machine into a synthesizer
Posted: Mon May 31, 2010 12:55 am
I'll be soldering together a SID2SID to add a second SID sound chip, allowing either stereo sound or 6 simultaneous voices instead of 3. That setup works with the MSSIAH sequencer/synth emulator cartridge I ordered, which also has a MIDI input jack on the top of it.
As you can see in this picture, I'm also adding 2 knobs to control the volume of each SID independently, plus 4 knobs to control assignable synth paramaters. These are soldered directly into the keyboard input on the motherboard, so there won't be any kludgey wires dangling around. 2 1/4" output jacks and an RCA composite video out jacked into the monitor output will be next, possibly followed by vacuum tube preamps. At some point I'll mount a 7" LCD TV to the case, so it'll have a built-in display.

Of course, it plays Commodore games, too :)
As you can see in this picture, I'm also adding 2 knobs to control the volume of each SID independently, plus 4 knobs to control assignable synth paramaters. These are soldered directly into the keyboard input on the motherboard, so there won't be any kludgey wires dangling around. 2 1/4" output jacks and an RCA composite video out jacked into the monitor output will be next, possibly followed by vacuum tube preamps. At some point I'll mount a 7" LCD TV to the case, so it'll have a built-in display.

Of course, it plays Commodore games, too :)