[thecabal]

I bow to your superior experience. I like the story of the 8080 music. I had heard of such a thing, but I didn't know anyone who had acutually done it. LOL

[Myrddin]

The 8080 music from digital noise was frankly awful. I ordered a sound generator chip, some bus buffers, an address decoder and a 386 amp. The sound chip was capable of all the fancy sound effects typical of Las Vegas gaming machines of the 1980 era. Much lower overhead on the CPU as well. I had more skill than money in those days. The swap meet yielded a Heathkit H-9 terminal. 40 chars by 12 lines. The local parts store offered a lowercase character generator ROM and some 2114 RAM chips. Five hours of prototyping made the H-9 into 80 chars X 24 lines with upper/lower case.

I did this stuff in the same time frame that I was teaching an electronics and microprocessor course at the local junior college.

You mentioned having a ham license. During that time frame, I had a refurbished ASR-15 teletype (from the swapmeet). I built a loop supply and a demodulator using 88 mH chokes with an op amp slicer. On Thursday nights, the southern California RTTY ham community would wait for Don Royer (W6PIR) of Pasadena to transmit the latest Playboy centerfold digitized into single-strike "art". I donated the refurbished ASR-15 to the local deaf community and bought the H-8. My wife was grateful to no longer hear the ASR-15 motor spin up in the middle of the night and hear that monster pounding away on the roll of paper.