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Comment by Dwedit | Hacker News Reader

I think the AY sound chip is overrated, nothing but pure 50% square waves. You move up to the next step, and you get the NES sound chip, with 12.5% and 25% duty cycles. Then you move up another step, and you have the Turbo Grafx sound chip, with short custom waveforms.

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Looking at this list of sound chips[0] is an interesting tour through past encounters with computer and video-game systems. Even today music synthesizers are still trying to come up with new techniques for generation and filtering/modification.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sound_chips

OTH it's impressive what you can do with multiple AYs when they have a dedicated CPU to drive them. For instance the Bomb Jack arcade machine has a separate sound board with 3x AY and a 3 MHz Z80 CPU and it sounds pretty nice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCQ_iFsFQNA

Here's Jochen Hippel's(Mad Max in the Atari ST demoscene) use of the AY's on the Guryss hardware(x3 AY). It's a quite lovely tune. They use timers to make "buzzers" and "SID-sound".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5TxsZNJpBA

Multiple AYs is a different story.

You can approximate 12.5% and 25% duty cycle square waves by playing multiple tones at different octaves and a different volume level.

For sure the 50% square wave is a limitation, but sometimes such limitations feed creativity. That's also why I intend to couple the oscillators to filters, so there's another dimension to play with.

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