Robert Yannes

Robert Yannes ( born 1957 ) is an American engineer. He began his career first as a hobby musician until he was a chip designer for MOS Technology, which had become a division of the Commodore. Al Charpentier presented Yannes to especially because of his keen understanding of music.

He developed the MicroPET with the help of Al Charpentier, which eventually led to the accidental prototype for the computer Commodore VIC-20. Yannes also influenced the design of the video chip VIC ( VIC-20 ).

Then he developed the synthesizer chip SID ( 6581 ). This chip had a protruding for that time sound resolution, so so music could be played in high quality. The chip was installed in the Commodore C64.

Soon after completion of the work on the VC -20 began preliminary work on the development of the successor VIC -40, later renamed C64 Commodore. Since the distributors for the C64 in developing GPU VIC II decreed more no built-in tone generator and it was recognized Yannes ' tremendous potential in the field of electronic sound generation, he has been exclusively entrusted with the development of a specialized sound chips for the new computer. As borders only a budget and a time limit has been set within which Yannes could realize undisturbed. Although the time frame, as in Jack Tramiel Commodore usual, was extremely tight, succeeded Yannes to implement the most part of his planned features in the new chip. At the end of this development as the " Sound Interface Device " SID 6581 has become famous chip stand with plenty of power for high-quality, melodious music production, at the time not only on the computer sector has no equal sought.

Although Commodore had managed a breakthrough success with the C64, Jack Tramiel was dissatisfied with his engineers as they do not quite have his objectively considered unrealistic timetable met. Instead of a bonus for the best selling home computer at the end of the story the developers involved were given a pay cut, which led to massive upsets within the workforce. Consequence of this extremely short-sighted and fatal for the company decision was the departure of most of the main responsible developer of the C64 such as Charles Winterble, Al Charpentier and Robert Yannes ..

After Yannes MOS Technology had left, he founded in 1982 with another former MOS employees as Bruce Crockett, and Al Charpentier the company Ensoniq. Here he had the first opportunity, a sound chip entirely on his own terms, free of any restrictions to design by budget or time limits. The result of this undoubtedly on the experience with the SID 6581 based development was the Ensoniq 5503, which brought it through the use of multiplexing, the implementation Yannes was still denied the SID for reasons of time, on all 16 votes in stereo quality and 64 KByte own memory contained. Use was the 5503 primarily for the largest competitor of the Apple IIGS Commodore.

In January 1998, the Ensoniq Corp. was. by the sound card manufacturer Creative Technology Ltd.. for 77 million U.S. $ taken over and merged with E-mu Systems to the Business Division E-Mu/Ensoniq.