It is not held in lock step with the 68K as you can disable it in software and have it return later but the 68K can reach out and touch things in the Z80 memory area.

Here in the megadrive/genesis though it governs the sound and farms things out to the two chips you mention.

The master system used this as its primary processor, as did many other machines throughout history (the gameboy for instance uses a slight variation on the theme). One is a Motorolla 68000, once upon a time an incredibly popular embedded processor (I can't say as well known as ARM is today as ARM did something quite rare in this and got themselves known to the public*) aka 68K. If you go on all the fancy audio hacking/fiddling sites ( being the one I would usually look at first, not sure where the others are at these days), and stuff like the game system plugins for foobar2000 they will be concerned with this sort of thing, and often able to spot sloppy emulation here by ear and what is causing it (abilities way beyond anything I have or are likely to gain this side of ear replacement).Īccuracy comes in to play when you want to keep it all in sync.

If only so you understand what a decay is, why you might want two of them, general analogue signal manipulation, have an introduction to the ideas of noise and enough digital to handle the digital to analogue conversion (DAC) and possibly vice versa (ADC). There might be more channels (the DS has 16 for instance) but the complexity drops as people can just make it in wave/PCM instead, and still have looping available if they need it.Ī link worth having, not for the megadrive but as an overview of sound cardsĪnyway you will probably find yourself having a crash course in the fundamentals of analogue and digital electronics if you go into this. The megadrive is maybe not quite the pinnacle of complexity in sound creation but it can hang in the same circles, nowadays it is pretty much all digital/software from the bottom to top. Depends upon the system and your background knowledge, and how accurate you care to be.

Sega genesis sound chip emulator