Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!TIS.COM!dmb
From: dmb@TIS.COM (David M. Baggett)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Strategies for Playing Digitized Sound
Message-ID: <8901121633.AA12910@TIS.COM>
Date: 12 Jan 89 16:33:48 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 20


   Has anyone experimented with this?  (We've all heard Starglider...)  Looking
in ST Internals, I found that the PSG sound chip has an 8 bit D/A converter.  
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like you can change the value directly; you have
to go through the waveform synthesis stuff (or the frequency/volume registers).
   8 bits of resolution produces decent (listenable) quality sound; does anyone
know how/if it is possible to change the 8 bit digital value directly?  The only
alternative I can see is using the noise generator and the volume control, but this
only gives four bits of resolution (awful).  The Stargilder intro sounds to be about
6 bit resolution -- anyone know how this was done?
   Maintaining timing for the samples is straightforward with Xbtimer, so that isn't
a problem.  44KHz is "correct"; 22KHz should be ok...

   Answers, anyone?

				Thanks,
				Dave Baggett
				arpa: dmb@TIS.COM

If there is interest I will post replies/source code to the net.