microprocessor sound

the first board i wirewrapped was a S-100 card for the general instruments AY3-8910(?) programmable sound generator. this was for my cromemco z2 home computer kit. i never dabbled in music (i let my siblings waste their time at that) but i used the sound board and my own experimental code for doing some really cool sound effects. it was a great chip. i coded up lots of sound effect projects and included a program that turned the keyboard into a piano and had a program for playing music before midi was around.

today's PC sound cards are more capable but not as much fun or as easy to reach by microcontroller programmers.

coding games is not the first thing a programmer is likely to achieve. you have to develop you "bag of tricks" first by doing a lot of coding projects.

however, if you start off small, you can get there without bailing in frustration - i've seen that happen a lot.

example: during one boring lecture in freshman physics, i programmed my 99 program step calculator to function as an elevator simulator. i used the display (turned sideways) of all "1's" (the floors) and one "0" (the elevator).
"11101111" by entering the desired floor number, the display would walk the "elevator" to the desired floor, one floor at a time.

totally worthless program, but working out the math of 1111110111 and 11011111 in a NON binary calculator (circa 70-80) probably is why i do so much algorithm stuff. :)

duh