Having problems with the philips saa1099 soundchip.

[0w0wkazii]

Hi everyone,

First of all, this is my first time here and I have searched before I was going to post my topic.

For my schoolproject, I have to use a soundchip to produce different kinds of frequentie tones. I've chosen for the Philips saa1099. It's a  old soundchip and it's pretty much obsolete. To program this soundchip, I'm using a PIC18F2550. Problem is I have been working on this for 2 weeks now and result = nothing. I can't get this soundchip to work and actually from what I've seen in the datasheets, it's looks simple to program.

you have 1 databus with 8 pins to send 1 byte at a time parallel. And you have three more other pins: /WR, /CS, A0. the first one is the write enable then de chip select and finally the control/adress select. the /WR en /CS as you can see are active low pins so I send a '0' to activate it. and if A0 = 0, the data you send is the register adress. and if A0=1 then the data is the data of the register itself. So to configure the soundchip, you must first send the register adres and then the data that goes in this register.

So in the end, it isn't really that hard to program this. So I've done everything, I configure every register needed to generate a frequencytone. and stil I don't get any results. I have used the hardware schematic from the datasheet itself ( http://velesoft.speccy.cz/saa1099-cz.htm ) and I've also used this website for some explanation of the chip (http://www.onastick.clara.co.uk/sound.htm).
After so many effort, I can't really understand why this thing doesn't work. It looks really simple to program but yet it isn't for some reason. And I've spend alot of time finding some information on the internet, but it seems like that I'm the only one that is doing this lol.
So if there are people that have more experience with this soundchip or electronics in general. Please help me out. This is a very important project that I have to do for my school and it's getting frustrating.

thx in advance,

0w0wkazii.

[djsb]

Have you got a copy of the schematic circuit that you have actually built (or at least a photograph of something on a breadboard/PCB). Have you connected the CLK pin to an 8MHZ clock source?
If we can see what you have wired up we may be able to help.

[GeoffS]

Have you considered a more recent sound chip?
The saa1099 is hard to source, not even sure if they still make it.

[JohnS_AZ]

Would have to see some kind of schematic tohelp.
The first thing that entered my mind was "Where the HECK did you come up with an saa1099?"
I would love to have a few of those to play with.