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.