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22 lines
1.7 KiB
Markdown
22 lines
1.7 KiB
Markdown
# Atari Lynx/MIKEY
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The Atari Lynx is a 16 bit handheld console developed by (obviously) Atari Corporation, and initially released in September of 1989, with the worldwide release being in 1990.
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The Lynx, while being an incredible handheld for the time (and a lot more powerful than a Game Boy), unfortunately meant nothing in the end due to the Lynx being a market failure, and ending up as one of the things that contributed to the downfall of Atari.
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Although the Lynx is still getting (rather impressive) homebrew developed for it, it does not mean that the Lynx is a popular system at all.
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The Atari Lynx's custom sound chip and CPU (MIKEY) is a 6502-based 8 bit CPU running at 16MHz, however this information is generally not useful in the context of Furnace.
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## Sound capabilities
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- The MIKEY has 4 channels of square wave-based sound, which can be modulated with different frequencies (×0, ×1, ×2, ×3, ×4, ×5, ×7, ×10, and ×11) to create wavetable-like results.
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- Likewise, when a lot of the modulators are activated, this can provide a "pseudo-white noise"-like effect, whoch can be useful for drums and sound effects.
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- The MIKEY also has hard stereo panning capabilities via the `08xx` effect command.
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- The MIKEY has four 8-bit DACs (Digital to Analog Converter) — one for each voice — that essentially mean you can play samples on the MIKEY (at the cost of CPU time and memory).
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- The MIKEY also has a variety of pitches to choose from, and they go from 32Hz to "above the range of human hearing", according to Atari.
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## Effect commands
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- `3xxx`: Load LFSR (0 to FFF).
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- this is a bitmask.
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- for it to work, duty macro in instrument editor must be set to some value, without it LFSR will not be fed with any bits.
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