I originally used R-2R DACs but I was lucky enough to
be able to buy a
couple of DAC08 chips at Radio Shack and built a circuit using 74LS244
latching buffers so that I could drive both channels of a single 8-bit
parallel port and 2 extra control lines (Select and Strobe).
On 7/11/2023 6:43 AM, steven(a)malikoff.com steven--- via cctalk wrote:
On
07/10/2023 11:31 PM AEST Mike Katz via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Way back in the 80's I was able to do stereo 4 part harmony on a 2 MHZ
6809 using two 8-bit D/A converters.
Much the same here. I recounted this on VCFed
a few months ago about
building a simple 2-chip 8-bit ladder DAC with one-transistor
amplifier for my Applied Technology DG680 S100 machine back in the
early 80s from this absolutely excellent BYTE article on how to do
polyphonic synthesis on a microcomputer (KIM-1):
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1977-09/page/n63/mode/2up
A schoolfriend who had an Apple ][ and had not done any Z80 machine
code before asked for me to hand him my Zaks book, upon which he
wrote out one attempt in Z80, crossed it out and wrote a second
version. Which worked perfectly. For the music piece I got it to play
four-voice polyphony after painstakingly encoding Bach's Praeludium
in C Major from my mothers' collection of piano music scores.
A few years ago I had thoughts about porting the 6502 code to the
PDP-11 and use the same sort of ladder DAC. Not sure if the slimline
11/05 would be fast enough for anything too high frequency, but if it
was, the slimline 05's power supply could then temporarily come out
and be perhaps be powered off some beefy batteries in that space,
along with a small 1970s transistor amp and 1970s headphones topped
off with a leather shoulder strap to lug it around like a giant Walkman.