SPC700
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The SONY SPC700 is the 8-bit sound chip used in the Super Famicom/Super Nintendo Entertainment System video game console together with a DSP. The SPC700 chip was very advanced for its time (1991) and may in some ways be said to rival today's wavetable synthesizer sound cards. It was very similar to the PlayStation's SPU.
The SPC700 and its companion 16-bit DSP were developed and manufactured by Sony, the company behind the PlayStation. Inside the Super Famicom/SNES the SPC700 is located above the DSP, on the left side of the sound module. The sound chip is connected to 64KB RAM embedded on a circuit board, and runs at 2.048 MHz. It is composed of six internal registers, and can execute 256 opcodes. The memory on the SPC700 is 64 kilobytes in size. SPC700 samples are in compressed format.
The SPC700's companion DSP operates similarly to modern wavetable sound cards, such as Sound Blaster Audigy. It is capable of churning out 8 simultaneous ADPCM voices at any relevant pitch and volume. Programs can be developed for the SPC700 and DSP in much the same way that programs are written for PCs or Macs that play music via their sound cards. The emulation-related sound format name .SPC comes from the name of this sound chip.
A tutorial for programming the SPC700 is on Wikibooks at here (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Console_Game_Programming:SNES_SPC700_Tutorial).
External links
- SNESAmp Site (http://www.snesmusic.org/)
- SPC700 Documentation (http://emureview.ztnet.com/developerscorner/SoundCPU/spc.htm)