Konami SCC

The Konami SCC (Sound Custom Chip or Sound Creative Chip) is a custom sound chip that was developed by Konami with Yamaha. It is one of several sound/memory management chips Konami developed in-house that ended up in use in home computer and video game systems from the late 1980s into the 1990s until the fourth generation systems were prolific.

Uses

The chip was used to expand the sound capabilities of the MSX home computer. Its standard sound chip was a tone generating PSG, capable of 3 channels of tones. As the computer used cartridges to run software such as video games, Konami placed the SCC chip onto the same board as the ROM inside the cartridge they produced. This added 5 more channels and they could be used in conjunction with the sounds of the PSG as well.

Konami also found use for the chip in arcade boards of the time period as well, such as the Konami GX400. The game City Bomber and others ran on this system.

Physical Description

On each SCC the following is printed: KONAMI 051649 2212P003 JAPAN, followed by a fabrication location/date number, like 8750AAA. The first two digits are the year, followed by the week. The letters after that are some location/lot code.

Capabilities

Unlike the PSG which was a tone-generating chip, the SCC is a simple wavetable sound chip. The chip has 128 bytes of memory built in, combined from 4 wave samples of 32 bytes each. Each of 3 channels gets its own sample, and channels 4 and 5 share a sample. Each channel can be controlled...
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