Yamaha Y8950

The Yamaha Y8950 is a sound chip designed by Yamaha for use in computers of the 1980s. It generates music by frequency modulation, building tones from simple waveforms combined to produce complex harmonics, and it provides eight channels of polyphony together with a channel of sampled or compressed audio for percussion and speech, and it responds to the piano keyboard and controller messages sent by the host machine. It was used in expansion devices for one of the home computer standards of the period, giving those machines a musical capability that their built-in hardware lacked.

Yamaha Y8950

See also