Top Gear composer remembers being blown away by the SNES' sound chip

Coming from composer Barry Leitch...

I dont remember much about it.. other than it had 8 channels and that was amazing at the time… later on we discovered the SNES ICE development kit had a sound card that was removeable, it was an ISA card, so we were able to take it out of the development kit and put it in a regular PC, we had some software I had designed, MEDIT that we used to compose and we were able to use the same software to develope music for several music platforms at once from the same data.. MT32 Adlib, Snes, etc.. I dont think we ever got it working for the genesis though. When I first started working on Top Gear, I spent the first day or so seeing what the music driver could do. Most of the manuals were in Kanji, so we had no clue what any of it meant, but the data structure was fairly obvious.. After some trial and error I discovered the echo effect the SNES had, which was mind blowing at the time.. it was a real time audio DSP effect.. No other system on the market had anything like that.. but it came at a price.. it used memory for every millisecond of echo you used.. This is why the top gear music had an echo of exactly one 16th note, it was all we could afford memory wise :)