In her latest Intersil “Academy of Analog Pinball Wizardry” video, Jeri Ellsworth replaces an HC55564 Continuous Variable Slope Delta (CVSD) codec chip with one she reversed engineered into an FPGA. What in blue-blazes is a CVSD modulator? Watch the vid and find out — as usual, Jeri does a great job of showing how it works, how she reversed engineered it, and what the results are. As some have pointed out, you can still scare these chips up online, but this was more about proving and showing than just about fixing.

Continuous Variable Slope Delta Modulator – HC55564

0 Responses to Jeri Reverse Engineers an HC55564 Chip from an Old Pinball Machine

  1. Wow, amazing job Jeri! (as always). I would love to see more of the actual process that you use to get this information.

    • Anonymous on said:

      Good point, John. I had the same thought, watching the vid. I understand enough to know, conceptually, how this sort of thing works, but I have no idea how you actually go about getting the information on how the chip functions out of the chip itself(?). I assume all of this was not from data sheets and info found online. I’ll try and get Jeri over here to give us some clues.

  2. Anonymous on said:

    Grammar police: “… and what the result is” (not are).  Or “results are”, take your pick.

    Otherwise excellent!

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: