nivek@cmu-ri-rover.ARPA (Kevin Dowling) (04/08/85)
The Ensoniq design team are the same people who designed the Commodore 64. There is a interesting article in the March 85 Spectrum about the C-64 Design. This is from the postscript: "...The rest of the team - Albert Charpentier, Robert Yannes and Charles Winterble, along with David Ziembicki and Bruce Crockett, who helped debug the project and bring it into production left Commodore in the spring of 1983 and formed the company Peripheral Visions. Their plan was to design another computer. To obtain working capital, they took on a contract from Atari - to design a keyboard for the Video Computer System, which was previewed but then, as the video game market crashed, never released. Peripheral Visions was sued by Commodore which said the VCS keyboard was a project that belonged to Commodore. At this writing the suit had not been resolved. Peripheral Visions has been renamed Ensoniq and will soon release its first product, a music synthesizer, Bob Yannes is senior designer and David Ziembicki is manager of production control...." Yannes is the soundchip designer for the C64. Originally he had placed a hardware lookup table to convert data from musical notes to equivalent frequencies but that was taken out because of the silicon real-estate that would have required. Apparently the full capabilities of the C64 sound chip are not fully known beacuase of incorrect and incomplete spec sheets that were released. Yannes said that some Japanese programmers would wrote some of the early game software according to the spec and programs made sound effects you couldn't hear! It's a very interesting article on the design and production of a machine for the consumer market. nivek Aka : Kevin Dowling Bell: (412) 578-8830 Arpa: nivek@cmu-ri-rover Mail: Robotics Institute Schenley Park Pgh, PA 15213