Hey guys, so this is kind of a spur of the moment video. But, my friend Kevin brought
over his latest sound card creation for me and after having a look at it, I actually
thought it was cool enough that I should probably make a video about this!
So, why is the card called the SAAYM card? Well, it gets its name from the fact it has
two sound chips onboard, a SAA-1099, and a YM-2151. If that sounds familiar its because
it’s the same sound chip combination that is used by the Commander X16.
The idea for this board first came about several months ago when Kevin and I were talking about
the sound system in the Commander X16. And Kevin suggested the idea of putting the sound
chips on an ISA card that could be used with MS-DOS computers. And, I was a little bit
skeptical that there would be any point to such a card, mostly being that there would
not be any preexisting software that would support it, but that turned out to be not
entirely true.
So lets take a look at the card. As you can see, it has 2 of the SAA chips, and 1 Yamaha
chip. Let’s talk about which systems these chips are used in. Obviously, as mentioned,
both chips are in the Commander X16. The SAA-1099 was also used in the Sam Coupé. Although
I think it’s most notable use was in the Creative Music System, also known as the Gameblaster.
As a result of that, it was also used in the Sound Blaster, which we’ll talk more about
later. Also little known, but it was used in some early silicon graphics machines.
As for the Yamaha chip, it was used in the Sharp X1 and the Sharp X68000, both popular
Japanese computers. It was used in more Arcade and Pinball machines than I can even list,
mostly Japanese models from companies like Namco, Konami, Capcom, and Data East. And,
an almost identical version of the chip called the YM2164, was used in many Yamaha keyboards
like the DX series.
OK, so arguably the Yamaha chip has no pre-existing software support. Or, at least up until now.
We’re going to talk more about that in a little bit. But for the moment, let’s talk
about the SAA chips.
I mentioned earlier about the Creative Labs Game Blaster. It was one of the first sound
cards for PCs, coming to market in 1987, the same year as the Ad-Lib. It used two of the
SAA chips, with each one having 6 voices, for a total of 12 stereo voices, which was
actually fairly impressive for the time. Later, when the sound blaster came out, they left
two empty sockets where people could buy the SAA chips and add them into their sound blaster
in order to get game blaster compatibility. Although, later versions of the card dropped
this feature since it was not popular.
Interestingly enough, I’ve wanted to do a video about the Game Blaster for years,
but one thing I consistently see is that when you open up ebay and search for CMS music
system or Gameblaster, you won’t find anything. These cards are super rare these days. And
thus, making the SAAYM card game blaster compatible became one of Kevin’s priorities. One problem
this caused is that, while the two SAA chips are all you really need to make music, they
are write-only chips and therefor impossible for software to detect if they are present.
So, Creative Labs added this big chip here, which does some of the address decoding but
also offers a way for software to detect the presence of the card, which proved critical
to emulate in order to have any game blaster compatibility. So, these two chips here exist
for the sole purpose of echoing back data so that the detection routines will work.
OK, so what I have here is a GRiD 486 computer. It’s actually a rebranded Tandy and it’s
one of the machines I used to do tech support on back in the 1990s. But anyway, I’m going
to go ahead and install this card in it, and let’s try it out!
These machines are built like tanks. You need to turn these little things 90 degrees, and
that’s how you get access to the ISA slots.
Before we stick the card in, I’ll point out that you can manually assign the IO port
and IRQ, just like most sound cards, but I’m going to leave everything on the default setting.
And then I’ll just pop this thing in like so.
I’m going to pipe the audio through my Zoom recorder so you guys can hear clear audio.
And we’re going to need a keyboard, so why not use the Commander X16 prototype keyboard,
for those that haven’t seen this yet. You can see it’s got all of the little Commodore
graphics characters on the keys. Of course this is not the final version, we’ve made
some changes since this one was manufactured.
OK, so the first thing I want to do is show some Game Blaster stuff. So here’s a silly
demo that shipped with the Game Blaster originally.
Ok, let’s try a few games. I’ll start by setting up Ultima 6. Now when looking at
the setup screen here, you’ll see there is no Game Blaster mentioned, but they support
the Creative Music System, which is the actually same thing. That's because the card was marketed
under two different names.
Lots of Sierra games supported the Game Blaster. I’ll start with Jones in the Fast Lane.
And here’s another one everyone will recognize.
LucasArts also supported the GameBlaster a lot. Here’s the Secret of Monkey Island.
Now, you may be wondering why I’m running the EGA version of the game. Well, if you
go to Mobygames and look for GameBlaster compatible games, there are quite a few out there. But,
the trouble is throughout the decades, many of the archives of these games have lost the
files for the more obscure sound and video devices. I deal with this all of the time
when trying to find games for my Tandy. Somewhere along the way, people discarded these extra
files, probably in the name of saving space, thinking nobody would ever want to use these
modes.
Anyway, let’s take a look at some more games.
OK, so up to this point, so far everything you’ve heard from this card has come from
the two SAA chips, which we’re using for game blaster compatibility. But, I said there
was some software that did support the Yamaha chip.
A guy who goes by the name of OPLx has created a VGM player called SBVGM. And, he’s added
support for the Texelec SAAYM card. For those that aren’t familiar with VGMs, it stands
for video game music, and it’s basically a file format for capturing all of the commands
that are sent to a sound chip so that you can play back the music without needing the
original code that produced it.
So, I’m going to start the player with a very familiar tune.
There are a few things I want to point out on this screen here. First of all, you may
notice that the program officially recognizes the TexElec SAAYM card. Then it tells us a
little bit about the song and what system it is from. But then down here it tells us
what chip it is using to play the tune.
But, we don’t have an NES sound chip in our system, so how does that work? Well, chips
like the NES, or the SN7, AY3, and others are all basically square wave generators and
produce more or less the same sounds. And this software is actually smart enough to
convert the data between these different chip types so that it can play any PSG type sounds
on the SAA-1099 chip.
So here’s another one. This song comes from an arcade machine and it was originally designed
to use 2 of the SN7 chips, so again, we’re hearing this being played on the SAA chips
on our card.
OK, so here’s one that uses the Yamaha chip, finally.
And here’s another for the Yamaha chip.
OK, this next one is really cool, look what chips it is using. Yep, that’s right. It’s
actually using BOTH chips in the SAAYM card. This may be the only card in the world that
can properly play this!
OK, so there’s one more thing I wanted to mention, which is this jumper. It changes
the input frequency from the clock so that the Yamaha chip runs either at 3.5 or 4 megahertz.
Looking at songs I played earlier, notice this one said it was supposed to be running
at 3.5 mhz, and Space Harrier was supposed to be running at 4 mhz. But I was playing
it using 3.5. Let’s see what difference it makes.
So this is what it sounded like on 3.5.
And here’s the same song being played at 4 Mhz.
So, this is a pretty neat little card you who like to play around with VGM files, but
also just for somebody who wants a GameBlaster card, since finding an original one is almost
like finding a unicorn. I would also mention that you can use this card in combination
with other sound cards, like a SoundBlaster for example. You’ll just have to jumper
one of the cards off of the default address because this uses 220 for the default IO address,
which is the same as a SoundBlaster. In my experience it seems like software that’s
designed for the SoundBlaster is a little more forgiving about using a non standard
IO address. So if I were you, I’d probably change the SoundBlaster to a different IO
port and leave this at the default. But you can do it either way.
So, for those that will inevitably ask. I do not sell this card, nor do I make any sort
of profit from the sale of this card. But, I just thought it was a pretty neat product
to show, partly for the game blaster compatibility, but it also kind of foreshadows the way the
Commander X16 is going to sound when it’s complete. However, I will put a link down
in the description field for TexElec’s website if you do decide that you want to purchase
one.
But anyway, that about wraps it up for this episode. So, as always, stick around for the
next episode and thanks for watching!