Has anybody built the Antic Sampling Processor (aka ASP)?

[ryansupak1]

Hi, I've got a few vintage and modern sound samplers but since I've got an Atari 800, I thought it would be fun to use it as an "extremely vintage" lo-fi sampler

It looks like several commercial samplers for Atari 8-Bit were made (for example: Replay and Parrot) and I suspect I could track one down with some patience -- but I also found this article:
http://www.atarimagazines.com/v8n8/anti ... gproc.html

The article contains the source code for a simple sampler software (check out that alliteration), and the schematic for a box that will convert an audio signal to something that can be read by the Atari. Basically it's a thing that plugs into a joystick port, and from what I can tell it's capable of a resolution of about 4 bits at 6kHz. (Vintage sampler hardware that can sample at low rates has become desirable, and is becoming more desirable everyday. Some examples are the Emu SP-1200 and the Akai S950. One thing I can say with certainty is that it's not at all the same to just use a wave editor to reduce the bits. The algorithm has a lot to do with the sound, not to mention the analog I/O stages of the sampling apparatus used.)

The primary thing that interests me about the software is that it has a Monitor Mode, which effectively makes the Atari into an "effects unit" that samples and plays-back the audio input without storing it to disk. (Obviously in 2012, it's much more practical to save the audio elsewhere.)

I had most of the parts to build the "input box" already laying around, but I suspect it would cost about $20-$30 to gather them if you were starting from nothing. I have not implemented it just yet. I won't have a free day for a few weeks, sadly.

Has anybody built one of these, maybe back in the day? If you're familiar with audio and sampling, is there a lot of "fairy dust" antialiasing? Is there pre- or post- smoothing filtering done by the software?

Thanks for any thoughts or info,
rs

[ryansupak1]

I built the box -- and man, it's extremely distorted. Not really usable in a broad musical sense, just in case anybody runs across this. rs

[Watcher75]

I did make this back in the day. It was a very easy build. I think I was in the 9th grade when I built it. From what I remember, the sound quality was about what you'd expect from the Atari 8-bit. The sample music files were about the same quality I was getting off my build.