For those who grew up with video games, the legendary sounds of consoles past are an instant nostalgia hit. [Thea Flowers] first got her hands on a gamepad playing Sonic the Hedgehog, so the sounds of the Sega Genesis hold a special place in her heart. Decades later, this inspired the creation of Genesynth, a hardware synth inspired by the classic console. The journey of developing this hardware formed the basis of [Thea]’s enlightening Supercon talk.
[Thea’s] first begins by exploring why the Genesis sound is so unique. The Sega console slotted neatly into a time period where the company sought to do something more than simple subtractive synthesis, but before it was possible to use full-waveform audio at an affordable price point. In collaboration with Yamaha, the YM2612 FM synthesis chip was built, a cost-reduced sound engine similar to that in the famous DX7 synthesizer of the 1980s. This gave the Genesis abilities far beyond the basic bleeps and bloops of other consoles at the time, and [Thea] decided it simply had to be built into a dedicated hardware synth.
Being new to hardware, [Thea’s] initial goal was to simply get the YM2612 making noise. Songs from the Genesis can be stored in VGM format, which consists of the raw data fed to the sound chip required to reproduce the music. By feeding this data directly into the relevant registers of the YM2612 from a microcontroller, it was possible to create a jukebox for playing back Genesis chipmusic.
Designing your own PCBs means you get to decide on the graphics, and it’s clear Thea had fun with the process.
The hardware was now producing sound, but noise wa ..
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