A Chiptune “Sound Card” for the Raspberry Pi

If you’d like to play music from your Raspberry Pi, there are many solutions for streaming music or other audio content from various sources. This wasn’t good enough for YouTuber “deater78,” however, who instead built an old-school sound “card” — or more accurately, “series of breadboards” — to play chiptunes on an AY-3–8910/1/2 sound chip. This chip can generate three effects channels, and were used in some Spectrum and Atari computers.

As seen in the videos below, the results are exactly what you would expect from old-school gaming tune machine. In addition to “chippy” audio, LED visualization is added to complement the experience! If you’d like to build your own, more info is available on the project’s page, and the code can be found here.