Toy Sound System

FredBlais

When I was younger I played a lot with the NES and SNES and I'm really nostalgic when I hear 8-bit music. I recently discovered about the SIDcog project from Ahle2 and I was really mind-blown. Something I would like to do is a mini sound system with 2 mini speaker similar to these one : http://www.ebay.ca/itm/2PCS-Loudspeaker-8-0-25W-8ohm-Small-Trumpet-29mm-Loud-Speaker-/351130213287?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item51c0fddba7

The system could have a little Nokia 5110 graphic LCD to display song name and some buttons : play/pause, next, previous... And an SD card to store the audio files.

I plan to use the LM386 audio amplifier IC, do you think it would do a fine job to drive the little speakers or it is just too old school?
At first, I would like to use SIDcog for the system and when I will have something functional I would like to add more file formats to it like the SNES .spc files, if I ever find how to decode it!

Anyway, I'll put my progress and some pictures here.

FredBlais

Some tests with the RTTTL ringtones player included in the Hydra Game System CD. Halloween theme song!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMU0LHWvByA&list=UU0n9rIda1jNIz4TLJs4844Q

FredBlais

I was messing around with SIDcog and the ExampleSidDumpPlay provided. The demo song is "Lost_Friend.dmp" and is about 450kB
On this website : http://www.hvsc.c64.org/ you can find a lot of SID music. I found "Lost_Friend.sid" which is the same song and it is 5kB
Is there anybody who know how to convert between .sid to .dmp file playable on the SD card?

Ahle2

http://gadgetgangster.com/scripts/displayasset.php?id=361
Use this tool to convert SID tunes to SID dumps that can easily be used with SIDcog.

A SID tune is pure 6502 machine code and needs emulation of half a C64 (CPU + some extra HW) in order to run propellerly. It can be done on the Propeller, actually a 6502 emulator already exists, but it needs some effort to put it all together. In the meantime you can use my dump tool that logs SID register writes to a file. Then it's easy to "stream" these register writes from a SD card to SIDcog. No emulation needed! (Of course my dumper does all the needed emulation in the conversion process)

Btw, SNES .spc is WAAAAAY out of scope for the Propeller. Samples needs A LOT of RAM and the DSP is "impossible" to emulate on the Propeller.

/Johannes

David Betz

Ahle2 wrote: »

http://gadgetgangster.com/scripts/displayasset.php?id=361
Use this tool to convert SID tunes to SID dumps that can easily be used with SIDcog.

A SID tune is pure 6502 machine code and needs emulation of half a C64 (CPU + some extra HW) in order to run propellerly. It can be done on the Propeller, actually a 6502 emulator already exists, but it needs some effort to put it all together. In the meantime you can use my dump tool that logs SID register writes to a file. Then it's easy to "stream" these register writes from a SD card to SIDcog. No emulation needed! (Of course my dumper does all the needed emulation in the conversion process)

Btw, SNES .spc is WAAAAAY out of scope for the Propeller. Samples needs A LOT of RAM and the DSP is "impossible" to emulate on the Propeller.

/Johannes

Now you've done it. You invoked the "impossible" word but you are the one most likely to be able to prove your own statement wrong. Have you started working on it yet? :-)

FredBlais

Thanks you very much Ahle2 for the dumper
Sounds like it would be easier for me to do this project using a Raspberry Pi... maybe too easy perhaps! I prefer sticking to the Prop! I should probably convert the songs I want to .wav

krs013

What about simple NES .nsf files? NES songs I've listened to seem to have only 3 channels plus percussion, though it looks like there is also a channel for low-res digital samples, so perhaps that's outside of SIDcog's abilities. Still, it would be neat to play back some NES songs together with the sids...

Does anyone know if the samples were used often in music? It's likely that they weren't, but I don't have a lot of familiarity with all of this.