Another mystery device?

[Lynxpro]

Well, one Pokey trumps ten TIA chips, that's for sure. But unless you're trying to play organ music in game, I don't really see the need for quad Pokey.:

 

Atari's Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back arcade games used Quad POKEYs; I wouldn't call those examples "organ music". 16 channels of audio on classic games is cool regardless.

[BalloonFighter]

This is an awesome device! Can't wait to hear about any progress on this.

[MAC-42]

For arcade perfect conversions of many Atari coin-ops? Yes!!!

I'd be happy with just dual POKEY, really. (I certainly wouldn't turn down quad, of course.) And this has applications beyond just ports from the arcades. Think of the way you'd always lose a sound channel, for instance, in Legend of Zelda when your life meter was low. Your game music was cut in half because of this. All you'd have left was the melody over the repeating life meter tone. Even just adding dual POKEY capability prevents that problem in original 7800 games that could be written in the future, as well as opening up a few more channels to play with.

 

Or we could just do it in TIA.

 

Well, all of this is idle speculation in any event. I guess we'll see what's in store in time.

[Andromeda Stardust]

Sound effects can be handled by the TIA; it's plenty good enough for things like blips and explosions. Let the Pokey handle the background music 24/7.

 

Also does this device handle everything the Pokey does (100% compatable) or just the music elements? This device could also serve as a drop in replacement for arcade boards, 8-bit computers, and (if it's super accurate) for chip tune composers.

[mos6507]

I knew something like this would happen sooner or later. I hope it can be done economically.

[Lynxpro]

Sound effects can be handled by the TIA; it's plenty good enough for things like blips and explosions. Let the Pokey handle the background music 24/7.

 

Also does this device handle everything the Pokey does (100% compatable) or just the music elements? This device could also serve as a drop in replacement for arcade boards, 8-bit computers, and (if it's super accurate) for chip tune composers.

 

True. It should be noted that Atari Games kept using POKEYs in a lot of their arcade games post 1984 just for sfx [well, Tetris used a POKEY for music too] while the music was handled by the Yamaha YM2151 - because the AMY didn't get finished - and speech synthesis by a TI chip. All of the audio was generally managed by a 6502 while the arcade CPUs were generally Motorola 68000s or 68010s. That's a lot of hardware. But yes, the Star Wars games were Quad POKEY. Crystal Castles was Dual POKEY.

[+bcombee]

Octopart shows pricing for the NXP ARM Cortex-M3 chip in the $2-3 range, depending on packaging and quantity purchased.

 

See http://octopart.com/partsearch#!?q=LPC1313

 

There's no FPGA component here, just a very tiny ARM core with a bunch of peripherals. I wonder if the HOKEY is just handling the audio registers and output; for use in carts, there's no need to hook up keyboard scan, serial I/O, or potentiometer scan features.

[Andromeda Stardust]

Octopart shows pricing for the NXP ARM Cortex-M3 chip in the $2-3 range, depending on packaging and quantity purchased.

 

See http://octopart.com/partsearch#!?q=LPC1313

 

There's no FPGA component here, just a very tiny ARM core with a bunch of peripherals. I wonder if the HOKEY is just handling the audio registers and output; for use in carts, there's no need to hook up keyboard scan, serial I/O, or potentiometer scan features.

There's a bunch of different parts on that page.

[CPUWIZ]

You can just make out the chip serial in the picture as lpc1313f, which is an ARM Cortex-M3 chip.

 

Are you sure that's a M3? Does the M3 have a DAC in it? Too lazy to go look, I am just playing with a M4 (well, I plan to, when I have a chance) and this old thread got me wondering.

[Andromeda Stardust]

 

Are you sure that's a M3? Does the M3 have a DAC in it? Too lazy to go look, I am just playing with a M4 (well, I plan to, when I have a chance) and this old thread got me wondering.

You can make a "poor man's" DAC by using a resistor ladder. Uzebox uses this technique to generate analog AV.

[RevEng]

Are you sure that's a M3? Does the M3 have a DAC in it? Too lazy to go look, I am just playing with a M4 (well, I plan to, when I have a chance) and this old thread got me wondering.

Pretty sure. I downloaded his picture and blew it up, and while the numbers were fuzzy I could make them out.

 

The M4 series from NXP is lpc43##, so the numbers for that look quite different.

[RevEng]

After a bit of search it seems that RN1, RN2, RN3, and RN4 are SMD resistor arrays containing 4 resistors each. Coincidentally, pokey has 4 bits of volume and 4 voices.

[CPUWIZ]

No worries, was just curious. The one I am about to start playing with is from Freescale.

 

http://cache.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/data_sheet/K20P64M72SF1.pdf

[+DrVenkman]

Almost two years on ... any progress? In the absence of both the XM and Concerto (neither of which may see the light of day for most active hobbyists and retrogamers), a working HOKEY implementation would allow so many more great-sounding homebrews for the 7800, as well as saving any number of the dwindling supply of POKEYs for A8, 5200 and arcade machine repair.

[CPUWIZ]

Almost two years on ... any progress? In the absence of both the XM and Concerto (neither of which may see the light of day for most active hobbyists and retrogamers), a working HOKEY implementation would allow so many more great-sounding homebrews for the 7800, as well as saving any number of the dwindling supply of POKEYs for A8, 5200 and arcade machine repair.

 

You do realize that Concerto and HOKEY are both Fred's, right?

[+DrVenkman]

 

You do realize that Concerto and HOKEY are both Fred's, right?

 

Yes, I know. Just because Fred is stymied or having very slow progress with Concerto doesn't necessarily mean HOKEY is similarly "stuck."

 

Perhaps my post was made with the subconscious hope that Fred or Al would pipe in with a surprise "Hey, Concerto may be harder than we all thought, but look what we've got for all those BBQC carts we'll be selling later this year!" Or something.

 

I admit to having been called an eternal optimist at times in the past. *sigh*

[cjameslv]

Well i believe neither of those have been pre-ordered or paid for by anyone, so one would think the timelines are entirely up to Fred as he owes us nothing. This isn't like Curt's XM (6+years correct?) that many people fronted money for and got nothing in return. So if the Concerto or Hokey ever do happen i'm sure we will get an update posted, until then i see no point in resurrecting a 2 year old thread to ask for an update.

Edited April 30, 2017 by cjameslv

[+DrVenkman]

Well i believe neither of those have been pre-ordered or paid for by anyone, so one would think the timelines are entirely up to Fred as he owes us nothing. This isn't like Curt's XM (6+years correct?) that many people fronted money for and got nothing in return. So if the Concerto or Hokey ever do happen i'm sure we will get an update posted, until then i see no point in resurrecting a 2 year old thread to ask for an update.

 

Well, pardon me, but I do. My prior post stated a very legitimate reason to inquire. A number of recent POKEY-enabled hacks, rewrites and homebrews have been created in the last several years and POKEYs are getting costly. That's reason enough to ask if anyone knows anything further, two years after this post was made.

 

Lord knows Fred's Harmony Cart is a godsend and worth every penny I paid for it and then some. If that's his sole contribution to our hobby, he'll still be revered and thanked for many, many years to come. Maybe Concerto's problems with the flaky 7800 hardware and the several variants made by Atari are indicative of wider generalized issues using modern hardware with these machines. Maybe HOKEY is in the same boat. If that's the case, that's fine. I fail to see why asking about HOKEY in a thread Fred himself started after two years of silence should be out of line. It's not like people have been asking over and over again for weeks or months straight, as people periodically do regarding the XM and the Concerto.

[Zonie]

I like the purple. Our Board maker must be the same as yours...

 

[CPUWIZ]

Yours look like they are from OSH. You can actually get purple boards from almost anyone. The VersaBoard's used in the store, are the same purple. I have another board I also made purple (from China).

 

What is your board for? Looks like a PI add-on of some sort.

[Zonie]

Yeah. OSH. good quality. decent pricing for the initial 3.

 

It's a touchscreen driver we are developing to read touchscreen coordinates and convert it to ascii or other data over the keyboard port or Serial port for old automated machinery which didn't originally have touchscreens.

Edited May 23, 2017 by Zonie