Amy

[ilaskey]

I always thought the fate of the Amy chip was a bit of a mystery but over at www.dadhacker.com in one of his wonderful Atari tales, someone has posted a comment:

John Foust Says:

April 16th, 2008 at 6:43 am

I was part of the company that bought the AMY sound chip technology from Atari. We’d hoped to use it at the heart of new synthesizers. As a digital additive synth, our software and methods quite resembled the technology that would become MP3. We had very rich sounds compressed to an unprecedented degree.

 

Was this known before?

[+Allan]

I always thought the fate of the Amy chip was a bit of a mystery but over at www.dadhacker.com in one of his wonderful Atari tales, someone has posted a comment:

John Foust Says:

April 16th, 2008 at 6:43 am

I was part of the company that bought the AMY sound chip technology from Atari. We’d hoped to use it at the heart of new synthesizers. As a digital additive synth, our software and methods quite resembled the technology that would become MP3. We had very rich sounds compressed to an unprecedented degree.

 

Was this known before?

 

Yes, I think Curt Vendal www.atari-history.com has some info on his site plus there are a couple of other sites with this info. Hopefully these people who bought the Amy chip from Atari will come forward soon and add more info about it.

 

Allan

[carmel_andrews]

Allan....Unfortunately any further info won't be forthcoming...I seem to remember that th company that bought the amy technology from atari threatened to go ahead and release amy (in any form) Atari served an injunction on them preventing them from disclosing any of Amy's technology to third parties

 

Also, the company that bought the Amy technology only had the rights to the ST version (not the orig. 8bit version) so any info that is forthcoming is only going to pertain to the ST version (or at least, what would have been the ST version(