Back in 1985 when the Amiga came out the Paula sound chip was not totally groundbreaking, but better than most of its competitors. It supported four channel stereo PCM playback. This could be used with sampled instruments to get a relatively natural sound. However there were many limitations, many of which due to the software not utilising the Paula to its fullest. Two years later, when the A500 came out, Roland released the MT-32. A consumer grade synthesizer module that was used relatively widely in the MS DOS gaming world, spearheaded by Sierra On-Line. It is a little known fact that you can use the MT-32 also on the Amiga with Sierra adventures such as King’s Quest, Space Quest or Larry. Does the Amiga sound better with the MT-32?
Tag: retrogaming
Black Amiga 500
Many a computer from the 1980s is today yellowed and brittle. The plastics age considerably over the decades. You can do some mitigation by retrobrighting with hydrogen peroxide. However for some machines you can even get replacement cases, and in some cases even brand new key caps for the keyboard. Today we will transform a beige Commodore A500 into a black beauty!
PSU Battle: Commodore vs Electroware
The original power supplies of our Commodore home computers are now at least 30 years old. Many need maintenance, some got lost or are defective. There are modern replacements. But are those any good? Are they better or worse than the old supplies? In this video we will compare my original Amiga 500 supply to a modern Mean Well based PSU by Electroware. We will mostly compare the ripple that both PSUs produce, which is one of the main factors that could disrupt the functionality of a computer.
The ReSeed SID Sound Card for the Plus/4 & C16
The Commodore 264 machines, which include the Plus/4 and the C16 used the TED chip for video and sound. The audio capabilities were not great: two square wave channels. The Commodore 64’s SID chip on the other hand was a proper three voice synthesizer. So back in the day people built expansion cartridges for the Plus/4 utilizing the SID and eventually games and demos using this were published. These cards are pretty rare, but now there is a homebrew clone of the card!