On Sat, 7 Oct 2000, David A. Gatwood wrote:
> Last I checked, there was a hardware mod necessary to get stereo.  The
> outputs were shorted together, to the best of my memory.  And the audio
> input was mono, and required making your own custom connector that plugged
> into the motherboard.  But yes, I agree.  It was a cool machine.  Even had
> a primitive PMMU.  Anybody want to do a BSD port?  ;-)

Yeah, the Ensoniq sound chip supported stereo output (8 channels,
actually), but the audio out jack was mono only. There was a connector
on the motherboard that had a multiplexed audio output, along with 3
bits of channel number, so you could buy an addon card that would look
at the low bit of the channel number and demultiplex and amplify the
output. Input was mono though; if you wanted stereo input, you had to
buy a card with its own ADCs.

I can't think of anything that would qualify as even a primitive PMMU...
there is, however, a product that gave you a preemptive multitasking
unix-ish environment: GNO/ME (GNO's Not Orca/Multitasking Environment :)
http://www.hypermall.com/companies/procyon/gnome.html The big limitation
is that due to the way the 65816 CPU works, the stack has to reside in
the lower 64K of RAM, and without any MMU, that 64K has to be shared
between the OS and all other running processes... so you couldn't really
get that many programs running at once, even if you did have a whopping
4 megs of RAM installed :) Still, it was/is pretty neat :)
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