POKEY
More info
- Creator
- Atari (Doug Neubauer)
- Released
- 1979
- Type
- Sound and I/O chip
- Channels
- 4
Atari's 1979 chip that handled four-channel sound, the keyboard and serial I/O on one slab of silicon.
POKEY (Pot Keyboard Integrated Circuit) shipped in the Atari 8-bit line, the Atari 5200 and a stack of arcade boards. Four independent channels of square and noise, plus distortion registers, gave it voices the SID could never quite mimic — harsher, dirtier, with a digital grit of its own. Doug Neubauer designed it in 1979.
Beyond audio it scanned paddles and the keyboard and clocked the serial bus to tape and disk. That was deliberate cost-cutting: one chip became the Atari's Swiss army knife. Chiptune artists still court it, often pairing two POKEYs for eight channels.