AY-3-8910
More info
- Creator
- General Instrument
- Released
- 1978
- Type
- Sound generator (PSG)
- Channels
- 3
General Instrument's three-channel sound generator from 1978 that gave voice to the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, MSX and Atari ST.
The AY-3-8910 was a PSG — programmable sound generator — with three square-wave channels, a noise generator and simple envelopes. Cheap and easy to drive, it became the people's chip of the 1980s: the ZX Spectrum 128, the Amstrad CPC, the MSX and countless arcade boards. Yamaha licensed a variant, the YM2149, on which the Atari ST built its sound.
That simplicity bred ingenuity. By pulsing the volume faster than the ear can follow, coders squeezed sampled drums and digital voices onto a channel never meant for them — the chiptune scene's version of sharpening a pencil with an axe.