X68000

The POKEY was made by Atari in the late 70s and is used inside the 8-Bit Computers like the Atari 800 or XL aswell as many Arcade Games of its time. Besides sound generation the chip actually handles the Keyboard Input aswell.

Technical Specifications

• Channels: 4
• Channels can be configured into 3 Modes: 4 x 8-Bit / 2 x 16-Bit /  1 x 16-Bit + 2 x 8-Bit resolution
• Channel 1-4: Can synthesize either a  Squarewave or Noise
• Stereo: No
• Noise is made via a Random Number Generator
• 16-Step Volume Control for every channel
• The generated Frequencies are around 3.5 Octaves
• Features a high-pass filter
• Datasheet for the POKEY is available here (PDF)

Donkey Kong (Atari 8-Bit)

Used in

Homecomputers

• Atari 400
• Atari 800
• Atari 600XL
• Atari 800XL
• Atari 1200XL
• Atari 1400XL
• Atari 1450XLD
• Atari 800XE
• Atari 65XE (XEP / XEM)
• Atari 130XE

Videogame Consoles

• Atari 5200
• Atari XE Game System

Arcade Systems / Games

• Atari System 1 (Marble Madness and others)
• Atari System 2 (Paperboy and others)
• Star Wars & The Empire Strikes Back (Vector Arcade Games)
• and many more single Arcade Games..

Special Applications

• Atari System 1 | uses 2x POKEY aswell as an YM2151 and an TMS5220
• Atari System 2 | uses 2x POKEY aswell as an YM2151 and an TMS5220
• The Star Wars Games | use 4x POKEY and an TMS5220
• Atari 1400XL | Adds an SC-02 Speech Synthesizer Chip
• Atari 1450XLD | Adds an SC-02 Speech Synthesizer Chip

Emulation

• Atari 8-Bit | The common music format for emulating the POKEY Chip is SAP. Lots of music files aswell as players and whatnot can be found at the SAP Music Archive
• Arcade | The Music of the Arcade Boards that use the POKEY are emulated through M1. M1 is a music player which is based on MAME and thus supports a lot of Arcade Games. More about M1 can be found here.

Marble Madness running in BridgeM1

Music Creation

Atari 8-Bit

• There is a tracker around for Windows, its called the Raster Music Tracker. It can save to the SAP Format aswell as produce real Atari Executables and .asm Code. You can look at it here.
• There are many Trackers and other composition programs running on the Atari Computers.. more to come