SCC

[NEMESIS 3]
BOX of Konami's Nemesis 3

What's an SCC?

SCC stands for SOUND CUSTOM CHIP (maybe Sound Creative Chip, which I heard also once). It is a sound chip made by

Konami
and it was provided in some of their Mega-ROM modules and also as a separate cartridge for some of their disk games (see below).

Take a look here for more technical info.

Which Konami cartridges contain an SCC chip?

This list was extracted from Michel Meilink's Konami page and Sean Young's Konami Games List.

What's an SCC+ chip?

Take a look here for technical info about the SCC+ sound chip. (By Sean Young.). Basically it is a normal SCC with an extra programmable channel.

Which Konami disk games use an SCC+ chip?

This list was extracted from Michel Meilink's Konami page and Sean Young's Konami Games List.

What are the specs of an SCC chip?

An SCC chip provides 5 channels of wavetablesound (not so soft and cute as FM-PAC and MSX-Audio, but nice if used properly). Actually, the samples are only 32 bytes long (defining a wave form) and are repeated to get `real sounds'.

You can read on the package of each Mega ROM game produced by Konami (with SCC chip): "...new 8 voice polyphonic LSI Custom Sound Chip Mounted." 8 channels? The chip has only got 5 channels and the 3 other channels are provided by built in in every MSX, AY-3-8910 PSG chip by General Instruments.

More info on the specs of the SCC can be found on the pages mentioned above.

What's the purpose of getting a Konami cartridge with an SCC chip?

Due to the massive cracking and copying of Mega ROMs it was possible to have only one cartridge with SCC sound chip and all the other games on disks. This required of course that you had enough RAM in your MSX2 machine to load those ROMs. To disable the game ROM in the cartridge, it was recommended to cut one of the game ROM's pins or make a kind of switch e.g. Technical info is here (By Sean Young).

Later a seperate SCC cartridge was made by the Japanese group ESE: the ESE SCC. But of course also the seperate SCC+ cartridges that came with Snatcher and SD Snatcher can be used.

Can I use my SCC sound cartridge for other purposes than playing Konami games?

There are several (old) disk magazines/demo/music disks, games and even sound composer programs that can use the SCC chip.

Here are some of them:

Are there any MSX emulators which support the SCC?

Most MSX emulators support the SCC.

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