"Market" for old macs?

[Cameron Kaiser]

> Last trivia question for the day/night:  I own Studio Session (the reason I 
> keep a mac 512 around) and I swear I am hearing 6 digital voices from it 
> simultaneously.  I was under the impression that the Mac sound hardware was 
> only 4 digital voices, and that the extra 2 voices were done via realtime 
> mixing on two of the channels -- however, literature from the time claim that 
> Jam Session/Studio Session use "hardware tricks" to get the extra 2 voices. 
> Who is right?

Neither really. The original Mac sound hardware had four *synthesis* voices,
which could be fed a waveform and act as a primitive wavetable synthesizer.
This produces four-note polyphony.

The other possibility is to drive the sound chip in "free form" mode, which
is basically conventional PCM audio output. I don't know Studio Session well,
but I suspect it just does the mixdown in software and plays the music out
in this mode instead of using the synthesizer.

Look at

http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.09/09.03/Sound101/
"Ancient History" and then for some actual code examples,
http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.02/02.02/SoundMadeSimple/


-- 
--------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ ---
  Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
-- Don't let 'em drive you crazy when it's within walking distance. -----------