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edited Jan 8, 2019 at 18:01

bjb

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Why does the SNES have a separate memory bank for sound?

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asked Dec 31, 2018 at 11:50

rwallace

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SNES separate memory bank for sound

According to https://snescentral.com/article.php?id=0088 the SNES has the following memory banks:

Work RAM for CPU - 128 Kilobytes (CPU temp. storage)
Video RAM for PPU - 64 Kilobytes (temp. storage for the PPU)
Sound Memory: 64 Kb

Why a bank of RAM for sound? I would've expected that if the sound chip is playing samples, it would fetch them directly from ROM where they are stored. Was it customary to first copy them into the sound RAM? If so, why?

hardware snes