PAULA MIDI SYNTH BOX Like SID BOX?

[XDelusion]

I've seen people take SID chips and create little synth boxes to be controlled via MIDI. Seems a lot of people are willing to pay a nice amount to have such a thing.

 So I'm wondering, how come nobody seems to be doing this with the Paula chip? Also has the Paula chip been cloned?

[XDelusion]

+1 Very true, very true!

The music industry at large has never known its ass from its elbow, man. When Chuck Berry was ripping it up on the crazy new distorted guitar and Little Richard was shrieking like a maniac, the music industry was employing Pat Boone to make that music safe for easily-frightened old white grannies. Nowadays the music industry thinks that you can make a singer by grabbing some skank off the street and running her through auto-tune. "The music industry at large" is the last place you look for actual talent in music.

A sufficient computer audio standard shouldn't be a standard at all, basically. There should be some basic standard capabilities, but manufacturers should be encouraged to color the results in interesting ways, with interesting (optional) effects, and we should bring back MIDI as a default method for music delivery. Back in the day, when each sound card had its own way of rendering MIDI, you could actually get different sounds out of them. If you didn't like the sound of an OPL2 sound card, you could get a GUS, or an IBM Music Feature Card, or hook up to an MT-32 through an external MIDI connection. Each of those would sound very different, and you could pick one that you liked. Now it's all the exact same stuff in MP3 recordings, and where there is MIDI, it's that same wretched Roland soundfont that comes with Windows. Yuck.

[XDelusion]

Two other audio chips of interest that I'd love to see in a midi box would be the POKEY, and perhaps the one in the Sega Genesis.

[XDelusion]

The Sega Genesis uses one of Yamaha's many four-operator FM chips, so there are actually a number of MIDI modules/keyboards that are essentially the same. The Yamaha FB-01 in particular is pretty much identical in terms of capabilities (minus the ability to play samples and the PSG carried over from the Master System,) with a couple more channels to boot.

Awesome, and they are cheap too!