Z80 chip MUSIC SITE
"When music is playing, scroller must stop"
There are many cultic sound-chips, like SID on Commodore 64 or POKEY on Atari XL/XE. This site is dedicated to Z80 chip wich is - with help of ULA chip - sound-source of ZX SPECTRUM 48Kb.
This chip and its specific sound has loads of fans among ZX Spectrum users - and not only.
Z80 chip
Many people think that attaching AY chip into ZX Spectrum was a regress. AY has only 3 channels of sound and pretty simple square-wave-based synthesis, whereas music generated by Spectrum's native sound-source - Z80 chip - was expandable to even 8 channels (software mixing) and it was able to generate really interesting envelopes (as described below). For instance music written by Tim Follin: it's in style of art-rock/proggressive rock - I strongly doubt it would sound good on 3 channels only and simple square-wave synthesis.
Z80 chip produces all sounds and sends them into BEEPER and AUDIO-OUT connector of ZX SPECTRUM (jack) through ULA chip.
Z80A chip, present in ZX SPECTRUM ULA chip (sending sound from Z80 to BEEPER and AUDIO-OUT)
Normally Z80 has only one channel of square-wave 1-bit sound. But Z80 is also ZX SPECTRUM's Central Processing Unit (CPU) so due to its 3,5Mhz activity (software mixing) Spectrum 48Kb has finally:
from 2 to 9 channels,
various modulations and envelopes,
drums & noises,
digital sound,
speech synthesis,
volume (it's impossible to make various volumes in 1-bit sound actually so even this is impressive)
etc... Still only 1 bit of course. We could say that everything mentioned above is theroretically impossible to make on this computer. But... it still works! Among several kind of synthesis probably one of the most popular here - is the "Pulse-Width modulation" (PWM). More info about it.
Z80A produced by NEC (present in some models of ZX SPECTRUM)
Authors of 1-bit music are:
Tim Follin
Jason C. Brooke
Special Erase
David Whittaker
Benn Daglish
Martin Galway
Fred Gray
Shiru
Steve Wetherill
Keith Tinman
Nick Jones
Andy Mills
Manuel Cubedo
Mister Beep
TDM
Factor6
Cheveron
Mark R. Jones
Patrik Rak
Frantisek Fuka (FUXOFT)
Sound Images
Jonathan Dunn
Qjeta
...and others...
Z80A chip made by SHARP
It's worth to mention that the Z80 chip (12 Mhz version) is a heart of ZX Spectrum's General-Sound card, used for playing digital 4-channel MOD music-files from Amiga and PC (in 8-bit quality).
General Sound card for ZX Spectrum, based on Z80 chip (for plaing MOD format music)
We also recommend :-)
Songs
available on this site are properties of their authors and they're available for
years in emulator files.
Authors of this site have NO profits from it. The authors want just spread info
about this music and the games over the world, which is benefit for the
musicians
and publishing companies.