Sound card I/O ports, AY-3-8910 etc

[Phil G]

I may well be lagging behind here but I was just wondering if anyone had done anything interesting with the two 8-bit I/O ports on the AY-3-8910? (Eg Ed's RC2014 sound card)

Decades ago on my Eaca Genie (which replaced my unreliable Nascom) these were the only 8-bit ports, it had odd bits of other ports available (bit-bang RS232 etc) but these 16 lines were completely free for the user to experiment with. I did an SPO256 speech board, eprom programmer board, a parallel printer, controlled my ham gear with it...  whats brought this to mind is I've been sorting the loft and reminiscing having found old asm printouts of long-forgotten Genie projects...    has anyone been using the AY ports?

Cheers

Phil

[Peter Onion]

Phil,

I'm just contemplating re-purposing a pair of AY-3-8912 from the Z80 CP/M system I built when I was at University in the 1980s.  I had not thought about what to do with the IO ports so I will be interested to see what ideas come up.

PeterO

[Phil G]

If I remember correctly (a dangerous assumption...) doesnt the 12 have only one I/O port as opposed to the 8910 which has two?   
The only off-putter I can think of is the present day cost of AY's which back in the day were ten a penny :-)

[S P Dixon]

I did! When I had my first classic RC2014, even though I had a digital i/o module, I had the headers fitted to Ed's module and liked using those - 2 registers which could be input or output. (You're right that the smaller version of the chip only has one port. The die is the same but it doesn't have the pins).

The MSX makes use of these two i/o ports.