Hi guys,
time for a little writeup:
Lets start with the soundboard. Theo has made a board for an SP0256 speech processor and an AY-3-8910 soundchip.
The SP0256-AL2 designed by General Instrument was available in a lot of home brew kits in the 80's for speech synthesis for several microcomputers such as the Talk-balk system (VIC-20), Voice box (Atari 8-bit family), Currah system (ZX Spectrum), SPD125 (Apple II), VS100 system (Tandy) and the Votrax system. There also was an ASCII text to phoneme chip available for the SP0256 called CTS256.
The AY-3-8910 is a 3-voice programmable sound generator (PSG) designed by General Instrument in 1978. In the 1980s the AY-3-8910 and its variants became popular chips in many arcade games, and home computers, such as the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128. It was also produced under license by Yamaha as the YM2149, which was used in the Atari ST. Theo has designed a board with a SP0256 and an AY-3-8910 including an amplifier/mixer, controlled by the Atom.
For this meeting, Roland took his green Atom with him including his newest hardware addition, the BBC-expansion board. He demonstrated the printerport by connecting and controlling a SP0256 by the printerport. He also connected a BeebOPL board to the 1 MHz bus port and filled the room with some nice OPL music. On the RPi expansion port, a RPi zero was installed, showing colourfull graphics. Also some people were interested in the Atom 2015 board so maybe he will order a new batch. Seems that getting a Godil is a problem at the moment.
Paul took a Beeb and Archimedis with him and showed some options of the Archimedes. He also had some power supplies and joysticks available so if anyone wants one, please contact Paul (DutchAcorn).
Wim showed his Project X. It's a Chessboard connected to the Atoms VIA. The chess pieces are provided with a magnet and detected by reed-relais build in the chessboard. The status of the reed-relais can be read back by the Atom. His goal is to get the hardware working ok and then replace the input routines of a current Atom chess game with new routines which can communicate with the chessboard to play an interactive game of chess. Nice piece of work, especially the implementation of the hardware .....
I didn't have much new stuff to demonstrate, only a lot of unfinished projects ......
I did however start a new BBC to Atom conversion of the W.A.R. game. I noticed that it was already programmed in the Atom resolution because it's probably a ZX Spectrum conversion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH5RKCDJ5U8
There were not many systems showed but during the day, some visitors came in. It was a nice meeting, nice to have a talk with everyone and good to hear what everyone is doing at the moment.
Greetings
Kees
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