Coming to a synth near me: Namco N163 (Patreon)

Once upon a time, there was a Famicom cartridge. I ordered it from Australia because it was cheaper than Japan (figure that one out...) and I asked the shipper if he would send some Tim Tams along with it. Weeks later, I got a nice treat and it came with a nice treat.

But I wasn't just ordering a game, I was ordering the ability to make Namco sound using my synth. The N163 is an interesting chip that is, in a way, the manifestation of sound from Pac-Man, Galaga, Bosconian, or Tower of Druaga. In older Namco arcade machines, there was a pile of logic that grabbed bits and bytes from memory to form waveforms, mix multiple waveforms together, and then the machine pushed all of that out as raw audio through a resistor network. 

By the way, do you want to see an old Japanese lady talking about her waveforms like it's a family photo album? It's one of the cutest things I have ever seen:

I have no idea if that embed is gonna work, here's a direct link.

Back to cartridge land. I want to control that Namco chip and (perhaps the top image is a spoiler but) if you recall, I need something that will fit in a socket that looks like this:

Suffice to say I'm not capable of making a tiny chip fit in there. In comes ImATrackMan with a KiCAD object for the Namco chip and Charles with some cleanup work, and we've got a board that kinda looks like an alien space ship. Et voila:

So now, I drop some pins on the opposite side of this board and I will hopefully be able to do some oldschool Namco audio, Ozawa-style!

Getting some sound out of this chip will be interesting as I haven't really worked with it much at all, but once I do, you'll be the first to hear. =]

Let me know if there's anything you'd like to see next!