Yamaha Y8950
Encyclopedia
Yamaha
Yamaha
Yamaha may refer to:* Yamaha Corporation, a Japanese company with a wide range of products and services** Yamaha Motor Company, a Japanese motorized vehicle-producing company...

 Y8950 is a sound chip
Sound chip
A sound chip is an integrated circuit designed to produce sound . It might be doing this through digital, analog or mixed-mode electronics...

, produced in 1984. This model was used in MSX-Audio cartridge for MSX
MSX
MSX was the name of a standardized home computer architecture in the 1980s conceived by Kazuhiko Nishi, then Vice-president at Microsoft Japan and Director at ASCII Corporation...

 personal computer.

This chip was introduced in three cardridge models:
  • Philips NMS-1205
    Philips NMS-1205
    The Philips NMS-1205 was an FM sound synthesizer cartridge which was intended for usage with the MSX Personal Computer. The chip was first produced in 1984...

  • Toshiba HX-MU900
  • Panasonic FS-CA1

Features

  • Compatibility with Yamaha YM3526
    Yamaha YM3526
    The YM3526, aka OPL , is a sound chip developed by Yamaha as a low-cost nine channel, two operator FM synthesis chip. It was notably used in a Commodore 64 expansion, the Sound Expander, as well as several Arcade games, such as Bubble Bobble.A very closely related chip is the Y8950, or MSX-AUDIO,...

     model
  • Two sound-generation modes available: Simultaneous sounding of nine tones or Six melodies and five rhythms (Compatible with the Character and Pattern Telephone Access information Network system and Teletex).
  • Built-in vibrato and AM
    Amplitude modulation
    Amplitude modulation is a technique used in electronic communication, most commonly for transmitting information via a radio carrier wave. AM works by varying the strength of the transmitted signal in relation to the information being sent...

     oscillators
  • Built-in accelerated
    Hardware acceleration
    In computing, Hardware acceleration is the use of computer hardware to perform some function faster than is possible in software running on the general-purpose CPU...

     4-bit
    Bit
    A bit is the basic unit of information in computing and telecommunications; it is the amount of information stored by a digital device or other physical system that exists in one of two possible distinct states...

     ADPCM speech analysis/synthesis circuits
  • Possibility of connecting External 256-kB
    Kilobyte
    The kilobyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Although the prefix kilo- means 1000, the term kilobyte and symbol KB have historically been used to refer to either 1024 bytes or 1000 bytes, dependent upon context, in the fields of computer science and information...

     RAM
    Ram
    -Animals:*Ram, an uncastrated male sheep*Ram cichlid, a species of freshwater fish endemic to Colombia and Venezuela-Military:*Battering ram*Ramming, a military tactic in which one vehicle runs into another...

     plus 256-kB
    Kilobyte
    The kilobyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Although the prefix kilo- means 1000, the term kilobyte and symbol KB have historically been used to refer to either 1024 bytes or 1000 bytes, dependent upon context, in the fields of computer science and information...

     ROM
    Read-only memory
    Read-only memory is a class of storage medium used in computers and other electronic devices. Data stored in ROM cannot be modified, or can be modified only slowly or with difficulty, so it is mainly used to distribute firmware .In its strictest sense, ROM refers only...

  • Built-in 8-bit input/output ports for keyboard scanning
  • Built-in 4-bit general purpose I/O port
  • Two Built-in general purpose timers
  • TTL
    TTL
    TTL may refer to:* Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor, a state-owned manufacturer of cigarettes and alcohol in Taiwan* Through-the-lens metering, a feature of cameras capable of measuring light levels in a scene through their lens...

     compatible input/output
  • Si-gate CMOS
    CMOS
    Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor is a technology for constructing integrated circuits. CMOS technology is used in microprocessors, microcontrollers, static RAM, and other digital logic circuits...

     LSI
  • 5V single power supply
  • 64-pin SDIP encapsulation (same used on V9938
    Yamaha V9938
    The Yamaha V9938 is a Video Display Controller used in the Geneve 9640 enhanced TI-99/4A clone, as well as MSX 80s home computers ....

    )

Software Support

Y-8950 is supported by almost all software which contains music composed in SoundTracker, Moonblaster, Oracle, Super Music Editor or Magic Music Module Combi, etc. All these editors support the ADPCM sample unit. Some support the keyboard.
Other software which makes use of the ADPCM sampler. E.g. Trax Player by NOP (a program to play songs (samples) directly from disk, while loading).
Actually, probably all Compile software, that supports FM-PAC also supports MSX Audio
Software, which requires the 256 kB of sample RAM
Ram
-Animals:*Ram, an uncastrated male sheep*Ram cichlid, a species of freshwater fish endemic to Colombia and Venezuela-Military:*Battering ram*Ramming, a military tactic in which one vehicle runs into another...

.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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