SN76494 (or SN76489) Arduino project

[SN76494 (or SN76489) Arduino project]

I'm playing around with a SN76494 (same as the SN76489 except it has a 500kHz maximum input clock rate), and attempting to hook it to an Arduino.

 

I'd like to hook up a speaker to the chip (probably that small Radioshack 9V battery amp that I have), and feed it either DATA from assembly programs or CALL SOUNDS from TI BASIC programs (TI-99DIR will come in handy for exports here), and have it "play" the TI songs.

 

Wikipedia has a great article with a pinout: http://en.wikipedia....ruments_SN76489

I've also found a guy who has a schematic here of something he did with a MIDI synthesizer: http://little-scale....ega-master.html

 

Being that I'm still not an EE by trade, and still have to ask questions, I figured I would ask a ton of stupid ones here in hope that I can get the end result up and running like I want.

 

First question:

 

1) The guy has a schematic with a 74HC14D up (which is doing clock generation, apparently). Is that still a good way to do it with the SN76494, or does someone have a better idea for a clock generator? What kind of pulse should I be doing? (Being that the 494 apparently has a 500kHz maximum input clock rate.)

 

As soon as I can get whatever additional parts in (like the 74HC14D if that's what I go with - I have tons of caps and resistors in my kits), I'd like to fire the thing up and write an Arduino program that just feeds the sound chip the equivalent of a CALL SOUND (1000, 440, 2) or something just to verify that it's working. I'll then fire up the other sound channels and noise channel to see if I can get some decent output in them, and then finally write a shell script (or even translating Arduino code) to import the DATA or CALL SOUND statements into the program to play the sound.

I have been working for several years with SN76494, developing the entire Hardware and Software interface.

At this moment, I've managed to run the chip sending data from the arduino, and after a long attempt to create a special keyboard, I finally decided to implement the MIDI protocol successfully. This is what you can get for now.

Check out the link below to see my project.

The original project with the specifications to run the project without MIDI

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/cy2utnlpfs9hkl4/AADbmfvKzHUCb88CVg8C9YeNa

The Arduino code with the MIDI protocol.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/4jxez232wn1v98n/AAA2WWggjad4_Q6avBNRfHBba

You can see the operation of the project in the following videos

If you have specific questions you can contact me on twitter at @ SergioRAlvarezP.