The SCC is a five-channel wavetable chip that lived inside Konami's MSX game cartridges. Each voice reads a 32-byte signed table around and around, and that table is the instrument. There is no oscillator bank to pick from and no envelope generator to fall back on: there is a curve, and you draw it.
Five wavetable voices, one on each block below. Sound needs a click first — that is the browser's rule, not the chip's.
The whole chip. Click any block to jump straight to the page that takes it apart: the diagram is the site map.
Drop in a Konami .vgm, or play the built-in demo, and watch
an actual MSX sound driver at work. Waveform tables get rewritten between
sections, five volumes are nudged by hand fifty times a second, the drums
come off the PSG next door, and every write lands in the live memory
block. No emulator anywhere — just the chip and the log. It is the whole
site in motion.
By 1987 the MSX's own PSG was three square waves and showing its age,
and Konami's answer was not to wait for a new machine: they soldered a
sound chip into the game. Buy Gradius 2, get a
K051649. The chip lives behind the ROM mapper, so reaching it means
bank-switching a cartridge — write 3Fh to
9000h and 256 bytes of chip appear at 9800h.
A 32-sample cycle can carry harmonics 1 to 16 and no more, so the
entire timbre fits in sixteen numbers, which makes the SCC a good
place to learn additive synthesis. Draw a square and
watch the odd harmonics fall away as 1/n. Draw a sine and
watch every bar but one vanish.
Channels 4 and 5 share a single waveform table — which is why so much SCC music doubles those two voices in octaves. A period of 8 or less freezes a channel on a DC level instead of silencing it. Reading the test register rewrites it. None of these are bugs to work around — each one tells you how the chip is built.
Konami's boxes advertised "8 voice polyphonic", which was five SCC channels plus the MSX's own three PSG ones, played together by the same driver. Add MSX-MUSIC's FM chip and you have the MSX's whole sound family — each one gets the same treatment on its own site.
Seven pages along the signal path. Each stands alone, and each ends with the same 256 bytes of memory — with its own bytes lit up.