BSMT2000

The BSMT2000 is an audio DSP created by Brian Schmidt for use in various pinball and video games (notably, the Data East pinball games, as well as its successors, Sega Pinball and Stern Pinball).

The chip is a special masked-rom version of a Texas Instruments TMS320C15 digital signal processor. The code embedded on it allows the programmer to use up to 11 voices of sample playback at a 24kHz sampling rate plus a single channel of a custom ADPCM format.

The chip's acronym stands for "Brian Schmidt's Mouse Trap".

The BSMT2000 was first used in 1991's Batman, and 2003's Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is the last game to use the chip.

In 2003, due to the supply shortages of the BSMT chip, Stern added hardware emulation of the chip on its WhiteStar II pinball hardware (via an Atmel AT91SAM CPU and three Xilinx FPGAs) for backwards compatibility with previous WhiteStar-based pinball games.

The BSMT2000 is currently emulated in video game emulators like MAME and PinMAME, as well as the M1 Audio Hardware Emulator.

References

• MAMEDEV.org: MAME's source code for BSMT2000, by Aaron Giles