Phasor

The Phasor is a 12 voice sound card for the Apple II/II+/IIe/IIgs designed by Applied Engineering (aka - AE). In 2016 Tom Arnold worked with ReActiveMicro to reproduce a clone of the board called "FAZOR" v1.0beta.

The Phasor is usually seen as one Mockingboard by programs which support the Mockingboard. Some programs can even see the Phasor as two Mockingboards, which allow for all 12 voices to be used. Other programs will directly support the Phasor, however the list is much smaller than those that support the Mockingboard.

Project Status: Complete. In production. Actively sold by ReActiveMicro. Henry is working on v2 which will use custom logic to emulate a lot of the ICs.

Support: Post on the [[Template:Phasor|Discussion]] page (link above) or email ReActiveMicro Support.

History

The Phasor was the second project collaboration between Tom Arnold of philosophyofsound.com and Henry from ReActiveMicro. After a bit of market research there seemed be enough demand to warrant this project. Previously Tom had worked on and released a clone of the Mockingboard. This project however would be more difficult since the Phasor uses two PAL devices.

About mid-February 2013 Henry sent Tom a Phasor to depopulate and start the cloning process as Henry was planning to be busy with other non-Apple II related business till about 2014. Tom produced a schematic and then relaid out a new PCB for alpha testing. This would allow testing of the schematic and new components.

Tom worked with the project in his spare time during 2013 and 2014. There was no major rush in the project since Ultimate-Micro still had stock of the Mockingboard v1a they were selling. Not much was done with the project till about mid-2015, after the Mockingboard v1a stock was liquidated.

During the whole process Tom had been trying to copy the protected PAL devices. After several weeks Tom managed to produce a good copy of "PH1". "PH2" however proved to be a lot harder to copy. Henry sent the PH2 device to JammArcade.net who specializes in duplicating older PAL devices. After several weeks they managed to produce a working copy about the very end of 2015.