Stereo Sound Mod and Pokey

[Rick Dangerous]

Hey all; the Atari 7800 was my first Atari ever and my second oldest console in my collection after my NES. About 8 years ago now i sent it out to Electronic Sentimentalities for an S-Video/AV mod with Stereo.  At the time one of the few premier mod-shops online.

 

https://electronicsentimentalities.com/

 

Here is the problem; i get beautiful stereo sound for 2600 games and 7800 games, but Pokey chip games only come out of ONE channel.  WHY?

 

Is it possible to mod the system these days to get Stereo from 2600, 7800 AND Pokey games?

 

Hate hooking up that mono splitter when playing Pokey titles. 

 

Thanks and looking forward to any insight on this! 

[+-^CrossBow^-]

The pokey audio is coming through a single external audio channel. If you mix that into both channels, then it causes issues with the audio output such as distortion etc. There are modders out there that have solved this, but as yet have not stated how they are doing it or provided schematics. The one modder I know doing this most recently plans to release his solution as a kit so he is waiting to get the PCB designs in place etc before doing so.

 

 

[DragonGrafx-16]

I see no point in making consoles with mono sound stereo... waste of money in my opinion.

[+-^CrossBow^-]

12 minutes ago, DragonGrafx-16 said:

I see no point in making consoles with mono sound stereo... waste of money in my opinion.

I also am not a fan of the stereo TIA mod because even if some games were made to use it like combat, it still doesn't track the audio properly with the sprite. So player 1 sound is always from the left and player 2 from the right, even when those players are on opposite sides of the screen. I believe only the homebrew Skeleton uses the stereo effect properly. But even then that is all 2600 games. No 7800 games were made with that in mind and doing so will cause the audio to shift back and fort in odd ways. So no...I'm not a fan of it since it just wasn't originally designed that way.

 

[Rick Dangerous]

So really....i'd have been better off letting it be Mono...good to know thank you all.  I may rectify this problem at some point. 

[+-^CrossBow^-]

26 minutes ago, Rick Dangerous said:

So really....i'd have been better off letting it be Mono...good to know thank you all.  I may rectify this problem at some point. 

Just trying to answer your question.

 

Again I know of one modder that has something they have developed that mixes the Pokey between both channels in mono while keeping the TIA channels separated without issue. But they only plan to release it as a kit and as an installation service through them and haven't done that yet.

 

Prior to that...what you have with pokey on one channel only and the TIA channels broken out is what the modders who offered stereo 7800 mods were doing and still do. But yes, I just wire the audio on the consoles I've done as dual mono so there isn't an issue. My AV receive automatically takes the left channel and makes it dual mono but not all do.