On 5/6/2022 at 5:35 AM, epsilon537 said:
Thanks for the suggestions. I'm not sure if soft cores exist for those devices (other than the YM2151), but if they do, the intent is that you can load them into the sound core slot on a live system - as long as they can be made to fit the interface and floor plan that is.
Well, The X1-010 was used in a whole bunch of arcade games by the likes of Seta, Alumer, Visco, Athena, Tecmo, Sammy (Before the merger with Sega), Data East, and especially Banpresto. As I've seen footage of
Twin Eagle: Revenge Joe's Brother running on the MISTer platform on YouTube, I'm certain that it's out there to find. Or, one can theoretically find the source code for core for the Seta 1st Generation Arcade Hardware and try to isolate the HDL code for the X1-010 that way.
The Phillips SAA-1099 was used in the SAM Coupe, The Creative Labs GameBlaster and early SoundBlaster series cards, a couple of Mid-Late Eighties Digital Equipment and Silicon Graphics workstations (as a timer generator and peripheral I/O controller), and several arcade games by Century Electronics.
The really tricky one would be the YM2414. It's an eight channel, four operator FM synthesizer with eight possible waveforms that was only used in Yamaha keyboards, and (second sourced) in midrange keyboards and synth modules by the likes of Moog, Budcla, Korg, and Casio. I fell in love with its sound on YouTube, but if it's not available, the YM2151 will work fine.
Dumb question: How fast are you going to clock that 32-bit RISC V core? I ask this because you may need a separate Sound CPU and audio buffer, especially if you want to experiment with the joys of PCM polyphony at high sample rates without bogging down the rest of the system. I would suggest either the
Hudson HuC6280 (Also used as a Sound CPU in arcade games by Taito and Data East), or the
Zilog Z180, as each can address 1 MB plus of memory on their own.
Another Dumb Question: Which FPGA are you planning to use, and how much I/O will you able to play with?